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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



MY STUDY FIRE 



BY 



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HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 



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NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

1890 



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Copyright, 1890, 

BY 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY. 



All rights reserved. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Fire Lighted, i ^ 

II. Nature and Childhood, ... 8 

III. The Answer of Life, - - - 16 

IV. A Poet's Crown of Sorrow, - - 21 

V. The Failings of Genius, - - - 29 

VI. Christmas Eve, 35 

VII. New Year's Eve, - - 42 

VIII. 'A Scholar's Dream, - 47 

IX. A Flame of Driftwood, 60 

X. Dream Worlds, ..... 64 

XL A Text from Sidney, ... - 71 

XII. The Artist Talks, - 79 

XIII. Escaping from Bondage, 84 

XIV. Some Old Scholars, ... - 89 
XV. Dull Days, 96 



iv CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XVI. The Universal Biography, - - 101 

XVII. A Secret of Genius, ... - 107 1/ 

XVIII. Books and Things, - - - - n 1 

XIX. A Rare Nature, - - - - - 116 

XX. The Cuckoo Strikes Twelve, - - 120 

XXI. A Glimpse of Spring, .... 127 

XXII. A Primeval Mood, - 134 

XXIII. The Method of Genius, - - - 140 

XXIV. A Hint from the Season, - - - 146 

XXV. A Bed of Embers, 152 

XXVI. A Day Out of Doors, - - - 159 

XXVII. Beside the Isis, 166 

XXVIII. A Word for Idleness - - - 173 

XXIX. " The Bliss of Solitude," - - - 178 

XXX. A New Hearth, 183 

XXXI. An Idyl of Wandering, - - - 189 

XXXII. The Open Window, 196 



MY STUDY FIRE. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE FIRE LIGHTED. 

The lighting of the fire in my study is an event 
of importance in the calendar of the domestic year ; 
it marks the close of one season, and announces 
the advent of another. There is always a touch of 
pathos in the last warm autumnal days, that makes 
the cordial acceptance of winter a kind of infidelity 
to the months that have lavished their gifts of life 
and beauty at our threshold. I am quite willing to 
shiver at my writing-table on sharp autumnal morn- 
ings in order that the final act of separation from 
summer may be postponed a little. This year we 
have been more than ever reluctant to sever the last 
tie with a season which has befriended us as none 
of its predecessors have ever done, and it was not 
until a keen northwester shook the house yesterday 
that we prepared the hearth for its annual fire. 
The day broke cold and gray, with an unmistakable , 

aspect of winter in the sky and upon the fields; the 
little land-locked harbor looked bleak and desolate, 
and the wide expanse of water beyond was dark, cold 
and threatening. I found my study cheerless and 
unfamiliar; it was deserted by one season, and the 
next had not yet taken possession of it. It was a 



2 MY STUDY FIRE. 

barren day; thought and feeling were both con- 
gealed, and refused to flow, and even my faithful 
pen, that has patiently traversed so many sheets of 
blank paper, stumbled and halted. After a fruit- 
less struggle with myself and my environment, I 
yielded to the general depression and closed my 
portfolio. A long walk brought me into harmony 
with nature, and when I returned I was not sorry 
to see that the andirons had been heaped with wood 
in my absence, and all things made ready for light- 
ing the fire. 

We lingered long at the dinner-table that even- 
ing, and when we left it a common impulse seemed 
to lead us into the study. Rosalind always lights 
the fire, and one of the pleasant impressions of the 
annual ceremonial is the glow of the first blaze upon 
her fair face and waving hair. Two little heads 
mingled their wealth of golden tresses at one end of 
the rug, intent upon the quick, mysterious contagion 
of flame which never fails to fill them with wonder; 
while in the background I watched the picture, so 
soon to take on a new and subtle beauty, with curi- 
ously mixed regret and anticipation. I take out my 
watch in unconscious recognition of the importance 
of an event which marks the autumnal equinox in the 
household calendar. At the same moment a little 
puff of smoke announces that the momentous act 
has been performed ; all eyes are fixed on the fire- 
place, and every swift advance of flame, creeping 
silently from stick to stick until the whole mass is 



THE FIRE LIGHTED. 3 

wrapped in fire, is noted with deepening satisfaction. 
A genial warmth begins to pervade the room, and 
the soft glow falls first on the little group, and then 
passes on to touch the pictures and the rows of 
books with its luminous and transfiguring cheer. I 
am suddenly conscious that a new spirit has taken 
possession of the room, liberated no doubt by the 
curling flames that are now singing among the sticks, 
and hinting that it is winter, after all, which forces 
from summer her last and rarest charm, her deepest 
and most spiritual truth. That which has vanished 
to the eye lives in the thought, and takes on its 
most elusive and yet its most abiding beauty. 

This first lighting of the fire in my study is, 
indeed, a brief transfigurationof life; it discloses to 
me anew the very soul of nature, it reveals the 
thought that runs through literature, it discovers 
the heart of my hope and aspiration. I catch in this 
transient splendor a vision of the deepest meaning 
which life and art have for me. The glow rests first 
upon those faces, eagerly searching the depths of 
the fire, that are the very heart of my heart ; it rests 
next upon the books in which the thoughts of the 
great teachers and the dreams of the great artists 
remain indestructible; it steals last through the win- 
dows, and, even in the night, seems to bathe the far- 
reaching landscape in a passing glory. Like the 
spirit which Faust summoned into his study, it 

reveals to me 

" A weaving, flowing 
Life, all glowing." 



4 MY ST&DY FIRE. 

After a time the golden heads begin to nod, and the 
dreams which they have seen in the glowing coals and 
the dancing flames begin to mingle with the dreams 
which sleep weaves with such careless, audacious 
fingers over the unconscious hours. The good-nights 
are soon said, and the little feet, already overtaken 
with drowsiness, make uncertain sounds on the 
stairs as they take up their journey to slumberland. 
Rosalind returns in a moment, and draws her easy- 
chair before the fire, with some fragile apology for 
occupation in her hands. The lamp has not been 
lighted, and neither of us seems to note the absence 
of its friendly flame. The book. that we have been 
reading aloud by turns lies unopened, and the stream 
of talk that generally touches the events of the day 
in little eddies and then flows on to deepei themes 
is lost in a silence which neither is willing to break, 
because it is so much -fuller of meaning than any 
words could be. Like the ancient river of Elis, 
thought flows on underground, and perhaps is all 
the deeper and sweeter because it does not flash 
into speech. 

For a long time I do nothing but dream, and 
dreams are by no means unprofitable to those whose 
waking hours are given to honest work ; dreams are 
not without meaning, for they are combined of 
memory and prophecy so subtly that no chemistry 
of philosophy has yet been able to separate them 
into their component parts. In his dreams a 
thoughtful man sees both his past and his future 



THE FIRE RIGHTED. 5 

pass before him in the order of their real sequence ; 
there are the memories, not so much of his acts as 
of the purposes that were behind them, and there 
are the aspirations and hopes with which he uncon- 
sciously fills the years to come. A bad man cannot 
face an open fire with comfort, and he must be a 
man of rare fidelity of purpose and achievement to 
whom its searching light does not bring some revela- 
tions of himself which he would rather have hidden 
under the ashes of the past. 

While I was meditating on the moral uses of a 
fire on the hearth, Rosalind put on a fresh stick, 
and stirred the half-burned wood with an energy 
that raised a little shower of sparks. The tongues 
of flame began to circle about the hickory, eager, 
apparently, to find the responsive glow sleeping in 
its sound and reticent heart. I recalled the strip of 
woodland from which it was cut, and like a vision 
I saw once more the summer skies and heard the 
summer birds. The seasons are so linked together 
in the procession of the year that they are never out 
of sight of each other. Even now, as I step to the \ 
window, and look upon the bleak landscape under 
the cold light of the wintry stars, I see just beyond 
the retreating splendor of autumn ; I hear at inter- 
vals the choirs of summer chanting to the sun their 
endless-adoration ; and from the front of the column, 
almost lost to sight, come whiffs of that delicate 
fragrance which escaped when spring broke the ala- 
baster box and poured out the treasures of the year. 



6 MY STUDY FIRE. 

AEach season has lavished its wealth on me, and 
lleach has awakened its kindred moods and stirred 
lilts kindred thoughts within me. I am conscious, as 
I look into the bed of glowing coals to which the 
fire has sunk, that I am even now undergoing the 
subtle process of change from season to season. 
The habits, the moods, the impressions, which sum- 
mer created in me have gone, and- new aptitudes, 
thoughts, and emotions have taken their place. 
The world through which I have wandered with 
vagrant feet these past months, intent only to keep 
a heart open to every voice from field and wood and 
sky, has sunk below the horizon, and another and 
different world has risen into view. Pan pipes no 
more, while Orion blazes overhead and leads the 
glittering constellations. Thought, that has played 
truant through the long days, forgetting books and 
men in its chase after beauty and its stealthy ambus- 
cade of the hermit-thrush in the forest, returns 
once more to brood over the problems of its own 
/ being, and to search for the truth that lies at the 
bottom of the wells that men have dug along the 
route of history for the refreshment of the race. 

The glow of the dying fire no longer reaches the 
windows ; the world beyond is left undisturbed to 
night and darkness ; but it still sends flickering 
gleams along the rows of books, and lights up their 
dusky titles. These are the true companions of the 
short wintry days and the long wintry nights. To 
find the life that is in them, to read with clear eyes 



THE FIRE LIGHTED. 7 

whatever of truth they contain, to see face to face 
the deep human experiences out of which they 
grew — these are the tasks to which the season leads 
us. In summer the senses wander abroad, and 
thought keeps company with them, hand in hand 
with nature, eager to see, to hear, and to feel ; in 
winter the wanderers return to the fire, to recall and 
meditate upon the scenes in which they have mingled, 
and of which they themselves have been a part. 

Rosalind gives the fire another stirring, and the 
last latent flame flashes up and falls upon that 
ancient handbook of life and toil, Hesiod's "Works 
and Days." How happily the old Greek ensnared 
the year, with all its hours and tasks, in that well- 
worn title! We, too, shall share with him the toils 
and pleasures of the seasons. We have had our 
Days ; our Works await us. 



CHAPTER II. 

NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 

Is it not due to November that some discreet per- 
son should revise what the poets have said about it? 
For one, I have felt no slight sense of shame as I 
opened to the melancholy lines full of the wail of 
winds and the sob of rain, while a brilliant autumnal 
light has flooded the world. The days have passed 
in a stately procession, under skies so cloudless and 
serene and with such amplitude of golden light that 
I have sometimes thought I saw a little disdain of 
the accessories of the earlier season. It has seemed 
as if November, radiant and sunlit, needed no soft, 
fleecy clouds, no budding flowers, no rich and rust- 
ling foliage, to complete her charm. Even the 
splendid tradition of October has not overawed its 
maligned successor, and of the oft-repeated slan- 
ders of the poets no notice has been taken save per- 
haps to cast a more brilliant light upon their graves. 
It is certainly high time that the traditional Novem- 
ber should give place to the actual November — 
month of prolonged and golden light, with just 
enough of cloud and shadow to heighten by con- 
trast the brilliancy of the sunshine. The border- 
land between winter and summer is certainly the 



NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 9 

most beautiful and alluring part of the year. The 
late spring and the late autumn months hold in equi- 
poise the charms of both seasons. Their character- 
istics are less pronounced and more subtle; and 
they are for that reason richer in suggestiveness and 
more alluring to the imagination. 

I have watched the flight of the autumnal days 
from my study windows as one watches the distant 
passage of the birds southward. They have carried 
the last memories of summer with them, but with 
what grace and majesty they have retreated before 
an invisible foe! With slow and noiseless step, 
pausing for days together in soft, unbroken dreams, 
they have passed beyond the horizon line and left 
me under a spell so deep that I have hardly yet 
shaken it off and turned to other sights and thoughts. 
One of the great concerns of life is this silent, un- 
broken procession of the seasons, rising from the 
deeps of time like dreams sent to touch our mortal 
life with more than mortal beauty. Stars, tides, 
flowers, foliage, birds, clouds, snows, and storms — ■ 
how marvelous is the -frame in which they appear 
and disappear about us ; as real as ourselves, and 
yet as fleeting and elusive as our dreams ! 

Rosalind and I have often talked about these 
things as they appear to children, and we are agreed 
that nature is a good deal nearer and more intelligi- 
ble to childhood than most people think. Children 
of sensitive and imaginative temper have marvelous 
capacity for receiving impressions : they absorb as 



io MY STUDY FIRE. 

unconsciously to themselves as to others. When 
they seem most indifferent or preoccupied they are 
often most impressionable. Unperceived by those 
who are nearest them, unrecognized at the moment 
by themselves, there often press upon the mind of 
a child the deepest and most awful mysteries of life; 
mysteries that lie far beyond the plummet of thought. 
It is only as one thinks back and recalls out of 
memory those marvelous moments when every visi- 
ble thing seemed suddenly smitten with unreality in 
the presence of some great spiritual truth, felt but 
uncomprehended, that one realizes the depth and 
richness of the unspoken thoughts of children. In 
a passage of great beauty De Quincey has described 
the feelings that came when as a boy he stood be- 
side the form of his dead sister. "There lay the 
sweet childish figure; there the angel face: and, as 
people usually fancy, it was said in the house that 
not one feature had suffered any change. Had 
they not? The forehead, indeed — the serene and 
noble forehead — that might be the same; but the 
frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal 
from beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening 
hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating the suppli- 
cations of closing anguish — could these be mistaken 
for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not 
spring to those heavenly lips with tears and never 
ending kisses? But so it was not. I stood checked 
for a moment ; awe, not fear, fell upon me ; and 
whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow — the 



NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 1 1 

saddest that ear ever heard. It was a wind that 
might have swept the fields of mortality for a thou- 
sand centuries. Many times since, upon summer 
days, when the sun is about the hottest, I have re- 
marked the same wind arising and uttering the same 
hollow, solemn Memnonian but saintly swell; it is 
in this world the one great audible symbol of eter- 
nity." That wind, more real than any that ever 
blew over earthly fields, was heard by no one but 
the imaginative child standing, to all appearance, 
silent and spellbound beside his sister's form. 

Not long ago Rosalind was looking through 
Goethe's "Autobiography" to recall what the Ger- 
man boy of six years thought of the terrible earth- 
quake at Lisbon in 1755, when she happened upon 
another very interesting and significant passage in 
child life. The boy Goethe had heard much of the 
discussion about religious matters which was warm 
in those days, and invaded even the quiet and some- 
what dry atmosphere of his father's house. He 
gave no sign, but these things sank into his heart, 
and finally there came to him the great thought that 
he too might personally approach the invisible God 
of nature. "The God who stands in immediate 
connection with nature, and owns and loves it as 
his work, seemed to him the proper God, who might 
be brought into closer relationship with man, as 
with everything else, and who would take care of 
him as of the motion of the stars, the days and sea- 
sons, the animals and plants. The boy could as- 



12 MY STUDY FIRE. 

cribe no form to this Being; he therefore sought 
him in his works, and would, in the good Old Testa- 
ment fashion, build him an altar. ' ' To accomplish 
this deep and secret purpose he took a lacquered 
music-stand and ornamented it according to his own 
idea of symbolism. This done, and the fumigating 
pastils arranged, the young priest awaited the rising 
of the sun. When the red light lay bright along the 
edges of the roofs, he held a burning-glass above 
the pastils, ignited them, and so obtained both the 
flame and the fragrance necessary to his worship. 
Does not this strange, secret act in a child's life 
parallel and explain some of the earliest experiences 
of the most primitive races? 

A beautiful and prophetic story is told of William 
Henry Channing by his latest biographer. He was 
a singularly noble boy; graceful in figure, charming 
in manner, expressive in countenance, sensitive, 
responsive, and imaginative. One night after he 
had fallen asleep he was suddenly awakened by a 
noise, and, looking out of the window, he saw a 
splendid star shining full upon him. "It fascinated 
my gaze," he writes, "till it became like an angel's 
eye. It seemed to burn in and penetrate to my in- 
most being. My little heart beat fast and faster, 
till I could bear the intolerable blaze no more. 
And, hearing the steps of some servant in the pass- 
age, I sprang from my crib, ran swiftly to the door, 
and, in my long nightgown, with bare, noiseless feet, 
followed down the stairway to the lower hall. . . . 



NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 13 

The footman flung open the drawing-room door, 
and a flood of light, with a peal of laughter, burst 
forth, and in the midst some voice cried out, 'What 
is that in white behind you?' The servant had, 
affrighted, turned and drawn aside. Instantly from 
the brilliant circle stepped forth my mother, and, 
folding me in her bosom, said, soothingly, 'What 
troubles my boy?' All I could do was to fling my 
arms about her neck and whisper, 'Oh mamma! 
The star! the star! I could not bear the star!' " 
There is a famous description of a kindred ex- 
perience in one of those poems of Wordsworth's 
which have become part of the memory of all lovers 
of nature. It was the first poem I ever heard Emer- 
son read, and the strange, penetrating sweetness of 
that voice, so spiritual in its tone, so full of inter- 
pretation in its accent, is for me part of the verse 
itself: 

" There was a Boy ; ye knew him well, ye cliffs 
And islands of Winander! — many a time 
At evening, when the earliest stars began 
To move along the edges of the hills, 
Rising or setting, would he stand alone, 
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake ; 
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands 
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth 
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, 
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls. 
That they might answer him ; And they would shout 
Across the watery vale, and shout again, 
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, 
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, 



14 MY STUDY FIRE. 

Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild 

Of mirth and jocund din! And, when it chanced 

That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, 

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung 

Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 

Has carried far into his heart the voice 

Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene 

Would enter unawares into his mind 

With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received 

Into the bosom of the steady lake." 

The wonderful experience, described in these 
lines with the inimitable simplicity of nature itself, 
marks an epoch in a child's life ; it is as if a door 
were suddenly left ajar into some world unseen be- 
fore. "Never shall I forget that inward occurrence, 
till now narrated to no mortal," says Richter, 
"wherein I witnessed the birth of my self-conscious- 
ness, of which I can still give the time and place. 
One forenoon I was standing, a very young child, 
in the outer door, and looking leftward at the stack 
of the fuel-wood, when all at once the internal vis- 
ion, 'I am a me' {Ich bin ein Ich), came like a flash 
from heaven before me, and in gleaming light ever 
afterward continued. ' ' The incommunicable world 
of childhood, through which we have all walked, 
but which lies hidden from us now by a golden 
mist — was it not the poetic prelude of life, wherein 
the deepest things were seen at times in clear vision, 
and the sublimest mysteries appealed to us with a 
strange familiarity ! To imaginative childhood, is 



NATURE AND CHILDHOOD. 15 

not the cycle of the changing seasons what it was 
to the German boy in the narrow and straitened 
country parsonage, an idyl-year? And is there not 
for every child of kindred soul "an idyl-kingdom 
and pastoral world in a little hamlet and par- 
sonage?" 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ANSWER OF LIFE. 

The short December afternoon was already fad- 
ing in a clear white light on the low hills, and the 
shadows were creeping stealthily from point to point, 
alert to seize every advantage and follow the retreat- 
ing steps of day without break or pause. It was 
that most delightful of all hours, when work is done 
and the active enjoyment or companionship of the 
evening has not begun. Rosalind had come in from 
a long walk with a charming air of vigor and vital- 
ity, which seemed to impart itself to the whole room. 
She gave the fire an energetic stirring, which brought 
its glow to a focus and kindled its latent flame into 
a sudden and fiery splendor. Then she drew up a 
low ottoman, and sat down to enjoy the cheer and 
warmth which she had evoked. It was not the first 
time that something which had smoldered in my 
hands had caught life and beauty in hers. I was in 
a somber mood. I had spent the morning, and, for 
that matter, a good many mornings, re-reading the 
Greek plays, and striving by a patient and persis- 
tent use of the imagination to possess myself of the 
secret of those masterly and immortal creations. 
To me they had long ceased to be dead, and to-day 
16 



THE ANSWER OF LIFE. 17 

especially they were more vital and palpable than 
anything that I saw in the world around me. I had 
finished again that splendid trilogy in which ^Eschy- 
lus unfolds the doom of the house of Atreus. I had 
seen the flashing fires which lighted Agamemnon 
home to his death; I had heard Cassandra's awful 
monody ; I had heard, too, that appalling cry which 
seemed to run through the world like the shudder 
of a doomed soul when the great leader fell in his 
own palace; I had witnessed the vengeance of the 
offended gods through the hands of Orestes ; and I 
had followed the Fury-haunted steps of the unwill- 
ing executioner of the eternal law from the temple 
at Delphi to the judgment seat at Athens. All these 
things were still in my memory, and the room had 
caught a solemn and awful quietude in the over- 
shadowing presence of these vast and terrible repre- 
sentations of antique life. 

Rosalind's coming broke the spell of memories 
that pressed too heavily on heart and mind ; she 
seemed to reunite me with the movement of present 
life, and to lead me out of the subterranean depths 
where the springs of the great drama of history are 
concealed, to the sunlight and bloom of the upper 
world. In her I suddenly found the key to the 
mystery which I had sought in vain to solve by 
process of thought, for in her I saw the harmony of 
law with beauty and joy, the rounded circle of right 
action, and a temperament akin with light and song 
and the sweetness of nature. 



1 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

"You are thinking," she said at last, as she turned 
toward me, as if to carry further a line of thought 
which she seized by the mingled intuition of long 
affection and intimate fellowship — "you are think- 
ing that — " 

"I was thinking that you are often a better answer 
to my questions than I can ever hope to frame for 
myself. I was thinking that the deepest mysteries 
of life are explained, and the deepest problems of 
life are solved, not by thinking but by living. When 
I see a man who has broken a fundamental law, and 
by patience, penitence, and labor has regained the 
harmony which he lost, I no longer sorrow that 
^schylus's 'Prometheus Bound' is a fragment. I 
see before me in actual realization the solution which 
the dramatist undoubtedly presented in the two 
plays of the Trilogy which are lost. Genius can do 
much, but even genius falls short of the actuality 
of a single human life. I have been among my books 
all day, and they have confused and overpowered 
me with doubts and questions which start in books 
but are rarely answered there ; you have come in, 
fresh, buoyant, and full of hope, from contact with 
life, where these questions find their answers if we 
are only willing to keep an open mind and heart." 

"But don't you think," Rosalind interrupted, 
"that the problems of living are more dramatically 
and clearly stated in books than in the lives of the 
men and women we know in this village?" 

"Yes," I said, holding a newspaper before my 



THE ANSWER OE LIFE. 19 

face to shield it from the glow of the ambitious fire ; 
"yes, more dramatically stated, because all the irre- 
levant details are omitted. There is the material for 
a drama in the career of almost every person that 
we know, but the movement is overlaid and con- 
cealed by all kinds of trivial matter. A drama- 
tist would seize the dramatic movement and bring 
it into clear view by casting all this aside. He 
would disentangle the thread from the confused 
web into which every life runs to a casual observer. 
The problems are more clearly stated in books than 
in life, but they are not so clearly answered." 

Here the children rushed in with some request, 
which they whispered in solemn secrecy to their 
common confidant, and then, receiving the answer 
they hoped for, rushed out again. It was a detached 
segment of life which they brought in and took out 
of the study in such eager haste. I knew neither 
the cause of the glow on their cheeks, nor of the 
light in their eyes, nor of the deep mystery which 
surrounded them as with an atmosphere. 

"There is more to be learned from those children 
concerning the mysteries of life," I said, after they 
had gone, "than from any book which it has ever 
been my fortune to happen upon. The mysteries 
which perplex me are not so much in the appearance 
of things, and in their definite relations, as in the 
processes through which we are all passing. I have 
always had a secret sympathy with those old 
Oriental religions which deified the processes of 



20 MY STUDY FIRE. 

nature — the births and deaths and growth of things. 
The festivals which greeted the return of spring, 
with overflowing life in its train, and the sad pro- 
cessionals which lamented the departure of summer 
and the incoming of death, had a large element of 
reality in them. They appeal to me more than the 
worship of the serene gods whose faces and forms 
are so perfectly defined in art. 

"I do not believe," I added, laying down the 
newspaper and stirring the fire for the sake of the 
glow on the deepening shadows in the room — "I do 
not believe that the deeper problems of living ever 
can be answered by the processes of thought. I 
believe that life itself teaches us either patience 
with regard to them, or reveals to us possible solu- 
tions when our hearts are pressed close against duties 
and sorrows and experiences of all kinds. I believe 
that in the thought and feelings and sufferings of 
children, for instance, an observer will often catch, 
as in a flash of revelation, some fruitful suggestion 
of his own relation to the universe, some far-reach- 
ing analogy of the processes of his own growth. This 
wisdom of experience, which often ripens even in un- 
trained minds into a kind of clairvoyant vision, is the 
deepest wisdom after all, and books are only valu- 
able and enduring as they include and express it." 

I was just about to illustrate by saying that for 
this reason "The Imitation of Christ" has survived 
all the great volumes of learning and philosophy of 
its age, when the bell rang, and a visitor robbed me 
of my audience. 



CHAPTER IV. 

a poet's crown of sorrow. 

Sitting here at my writing-table loaded with 
magazines, reviews, and recent books, the fire burn- 
ing cheerily on the hearth, Rosalind meditatively 
plying her needle, and wind and rain without in- 
creasing by contrast the inner warmth and bright- 
ness, it is not easy to realize the pathos of life as 
one reads it in poetry, nor to enter into its mystery 
of suffering as it has pressed heavily upon some of 
the greatest poets. The fountains of joy and sor- 
row are for the most part locked up in ourselves, but 
there are always those against whom, by some mys- 
terious conjunction of the stars, calamity and dis- 
aster are written in a lifelong sentence. It is the 
lot of all superior natures to suffer as a part of their 
training and as the price of their gifts ; but this 
suffering has often no thorn of outward loss thrust 
into its sensitive heart. There are those, however, 
on whose careers shadows from within and from 
without meet in a common darkness and complete 
that slow anguish of soul by which a personal agony 
is sometimes transmuted into a universal consola- 
tion and strength. The anguish of the cross has 
always been the prelude to the psalms of deliver- 



22 MY STUDY FIRE. 

ance, and the world has made no new conquest of 
truth and life except through those who have trod- 
den the via dolorosa. 

I am quite sure that these thoughts are in the 
mind, or rather in the heart, of Rosalind, for she 
drops her work at intervals and looks into the fire 
with the intentness of gaze of one who sees some- 
thing which she does not understand. I am not 
blind to the vision which lies before her and fills 
her with doubt and uncertainty. It is the little town 
of Tous which the fire pictures before her, its white 
roofs glistening in the light of the Persian summer 
day. But it is not the beauty of the Oriental city 
which holds her gaze, it is the funeral train of a 
dead poet passing through the western gate while 
the reward of his immortal work, long withheld by 
an ignoble king, is borne into the deserted streets 
by the slow-moving camels. Surely the irony of 
what men call destiny was never more strikingly 
illustrated than in the story of Firdousi, the great 
epic poet who sang for Persia as Homer sang for 
Greece. Rosalind, who always wants to know a 
man of genius on the side of his misfortunes or his 
heart history, began the evening by reading aloud 
Mr. Gosse's picturesque "Firdousi in Exile," a 
poem of pleasant descriptive quality, but lacking 
that undertone of pathos which the story ought to 
have carried with itself. Such a story puts one in 
a silent mood, and in the lull of conversation I have 
read to myself Mr. Arnold's fine rendering of the 



A POET'S CRO WN OF SORKO W. 23 

famous episode of "Sohrab and Rustem" from the 
"Epic of Kings"; a noble piece of English blank 
verse, from which I cannot forbear quoting a well- 
known passage, so full of deep, quiet beauty is it : 

" But the majestic river floated on, 
Out of the mist and hum of that low land, 
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, 
Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste, 
Under the solitary moon ; he flow'd 
Right for the polar star, past Orgunje, 
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin 
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, 
And split his currents ; that for many a league 
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along 
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — 
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, 
A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last 
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars 
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea." 

Not unlike the movement of the Oxus was the 
life of the poet whose song has touched it with a 
beauty not its own ; a life fretted by jealousies, 
broken by stupid treachery, but sweeping onward, 
true to its star, and finding peace at last in that 
fathomless sea to which all life is tributary. The 
pathos of such life lies not so much in individual 
suffering as in the contrast between the service ren- 
dered and the recognition accorded to it. The 
poet had immortalized his country and his master, 



24 MY STUDY FIRE. 

and his reward after thirty years of toil was a long 
exile. 

" In vain through sixty thousand verses clear 

He sang of feuds and battles, friend and foe, 
Of the frail heart of Kaous, spent with fear, 

And Kal Khosrau who vanished in the snow, 
And white-haired Zal who won the secret love 

Of Rudabeh where water-lilies blow, 
And lordliest Rustem, armed by gods above 

With every power and virtue mortals known." 

For this inestimable service of holding aloft over 
Persian history the torch of the imagination until 
it lay clear and luminous in the sight of the centu- 
ries, Firdousi was condemned to learn the bitter- 
ness of wide and restless wanderings. Many a Tar- 
tar camp knew him; Herat, the mountains about 
the Caspian, Astrabad, the Tigris, and Bagdad saw 
the white-haired poet pass, or accorded him a brief 
and broken rest from journeying. There is an 
atmosphere of poetry about these ancient names, 
but no association is likely to linger longer in the 
memory of men than the fact that they were sta- 
tions in Firdousi's exile. It is one of the uncon- 
scious gifts of genius that it bestows immortality 
upon all who come into relation with it. But the 
crowning touch of pathos came at the close, when 
the long withheld treasure entered the gates of Tous 
as the body of the poet was borne out of the city to 
its last repose. The repentance of Mahmoud had 
come too late ; he had blindly thrust aside the rich- 



A POET'S CROWN OF SORROW. 25 

est crown of good fame ever offered to a Persian 
king. 

But there are sadder stories than that of Firdousi; 
one story, notably, which all men recall instinctively 
when they speak of exile. The Persian poet had 
written the "Epic of Kings" in a palace, and with 
the resources of a king at command, but Dante was 
a homeless wanderer in the years which saw the 
birth of the Divine Comedy. To that great song 
in which the heart of Mediaevalism was to live for- 
ever, Florence contributed nothing but the anguish 
of soul through which the mind slowly finds its way 
to the highest truth. A noble nature, full of deep 
convictions, fervent loves, with the sensitiveness 
and prophetic sight of genius, cut off from all natural 
channels of growth, activity, and ambition, con- 
demned to 

". . . . prove how salt a savor hath 
The bread of others, and how hard a path 
To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs." 

Surely no great man ever ate his bread wet with 
tears of deeper bitterness than Dante. One has 
but to recall his stern love of truth and his intense 
sensitiveness to injustice, to imagine in some degree 
what fathomless depths of suffering lay hidden 
from the eyes of men under that calm, majestic 
composure of manner and speech. The familiar 
story of his encounter with the Florentine black- 
smith comes to mind as indicating how his proud 
spirit resented the slightest injustice. One morn- 



26 MY STUDY FIRE. 

ing, as the blacksmith was singing snatches from 
the song of the new poet, Dante passed by, listened 
a moment, and then, in a sudden passion, strode 
into the shop and began throwing the implements 
which the smith had about him into the street. 

"What are you doing? Are you mad?" cried the 
blacksmith, so overcome with astonishment that he 
made no effort to protect his property. 

"And what are you doing?" replied the poet, 
fast emptying the shop of its tools. 

"I am working at my proper business, and you 
are spoiling my work. ' ' 

"If you do not wish me to spoil your things, do 
not spoil mine." 

"What thing of yours am I spoiling?" 

"You are singing something of mine, but not as 
I wrote it. I have no other trade but this, and you 
spoil it for me." 

The poet departed as abruptly as he came. He 
had satisfied the sense of injustice done him by swift 
punishment ; and it does not surprise us to be told 
by Sacchetti that the blacksmith, having collected 
his scattered tools and returned to his work, hence- 
forth sang other songs. This simple incident dis- 
closes that sensitiveness to injustice which made the 
banishment of Dante one long torture of soul. 
They utterly mistake the nature of greatness who 
imagine that the bitterest sorrow of such experiences 
as those of Firdousi and Dante lies in loss of those 
things which most men value; the sharpest thorn 



A POET'S CROWN OF SORROW. 27 

in such crowns is the sense of ingratitude and injus- 
tice, the consciousness of the possession of great 
gifts rejected and cast aside. There is nothing 
more tragic in all the range of life than the fate of 
those who, like Jeremiah, Cassandra, and Tiresias, 
are condemned to see the truth, to speak it, and to 
be rebuked and rejected by the men about them. 
Could anything be more agonizing than to see clearly 
an approaching danger, to point it out, and be 
thrust aside with laughter or curses, and then to 
watch, helpless and solitary, the awful and implaca- 
ble approach of doom? In some degree this lot is 
shared by every poet, and to the end of time every 
poet will find such a sorrow a part of his birthright. 

"After all," said Rosalind, suddenly breaking 
the silence of thought that has evidently traveled 
along the same path as my own — "after all, I'm not 
sure that they are to be pitied." 

"Pity is the last word I should think of in con- 
nection with them; it is only a confusion of ideas 
which makes us even feel like pitying them. The 
real business of life, as Carlyle tried so hard to 
make us believe, is to find the truth and to live by 
it. If, in the doing of this, what men call happi- 
ness falls to our lot, well and good; but it must be 
as an incident, not as an end. There come to great, 
solitary, and sorely smitten souls moments of clear 
sight, of assurance of victory, of unspeakable fel- 
lowship with truth and life and God, which out- 
weigh years of sorrow and bitterness. Firdousi 



28 MY STUDY FIRE. 

knew that he had left Persia a priceless possession, 
and the Purgatorio of Dante w.as not too much to 
pay for the Paradiso." 

"And yet," said Rosalind slowly, looking into 
the fire, and thinking, perhaps, of the children 
asleep with happy dreams, and all the sweet peace 
of the home — "and yet how much they lose!" 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FAILINGS OF GENIUS. 

The study fire burns for the most part in a quiet, 
meditative way that fails in with the thought and 
the talk that are inspired by it. Occasionally, how- 
ever, it crackles and snaps in an argumentative mood 
that makes one wonder what sort of communication 
it is trying to have with the world around it. Is it 
the indignant protest of some dismembered tree 
ruthlessly cut down in the morning of life, that ener- 
getically but ineffectually sputters itself forth in the 
glowing heat ? Perhaps if Gilbert White, or Thoreau, 
or Burroughs happened to fill my easy-chair at such 
a moment, this question might be answered; I, in 
my ignorance, can only ask it. Of one thing I am 
certain, however: that^when the fire falls into this 
humor it is quite likely to take Rosalind and myself 
with it; on such occasions the quiet talk or the long, 
uninterrupted reading gives place to a discussion 
which is likely to be prolonged until the back-log 
falls in two and the ashes lie white and powdering 
around the expiring embers. Even then the pretty 
bellows which came several Christmases ago from 
one whose charm makes it impossible to use the 
word common even to describe her friendship for 
29 



3° MY STUDY FIRE. 

Rosalind and myself, are vigorously used to give 
both fire and talk a few minutes' grace. 

It is generally concerning some fact or event 
which disturbs Rosalind's idealization of life that 
these discussions rise and flourish. This charming 
woman persists, for instance, in declining to take 
any account of traits and characteristics in eminent 
men of letters which impair the symmetry of the 
ideal literary life; with delightful feminine insistence, 
she will have her literary man a picturesque ideal, 
or else will not have him at all. For myself, on the 
other hand, I am rather attracted than repelled by 
the failings of great men ; in their human limita- 
tions, their prejudices, their various deflections from 
the line of perfect living, I find the ties that link 
them to myself and to a humanity whose perfection 
is not only a vague dream of the future, but actually 
and for the deepest reasons impossible. The faults 
of men of genius have been emphasized, misre- 
presented, and exaggerated in a way that makes 
most writing about such men of no value to those 
who care for truth. The men are few in every age 
who can honestly and intelligently enter into and 
possess the life of a former time; the men who can 
comprehend a human life that belongs to the past 
are fewer still. The writers who have been most 
active, radical, and influential are those whose secret 
is most likely to escape the search of biographers and 
critics. Most of what has been written about such 
men, for instance, as Petrarch, Goethe, Voltaire, 



THE FAILINGS OF GENIUS. 3 1 

Heine, Carlyle, may be wisely consigned to that 
insatiable spirit of flame which devours falsehoods 
and crude, worthless stuff with the same appetite 
which it brings to the choicest books in the world. 
Men of genius are as much amenable to law as 
the meanest of their fellow-creatures, but the latter 
are not always the best interpreters of that law. 
English criticism owes Carlyle an immense debt for 
destroying the superstition that every man of letters 
must be brought to the bar of the Thirty-nine Arti- 
cles; and criticism in this country is slow to learn 
from such spirits as Emerson the true standards and 
measures of greatness. For the most part, ignor- 
ance and stupid unbelief have waylaid and attempted 
to throttle those hardy spirits who have ventured to 
set foot in the Temple of Fame. 

Men of genius, as I often tell Rosalind, must always 
stand a very poor chance with the conventional 
people; the people, that is, who accept the tradi- 
tional standards they find about them, and who live 
on the surface of things. It is the constant ten- 
dency of life, like the earth's crust, to cool off and 
harden ; it is the common task of all men of origi- 
nal power to reverse this course of things. A good 
many men perform this duty in a needlessly offen- 
sive manner; they lack the sound sense of Richter, 
who, when he found that his habit of omitting the 
omnipresent collar from his toilet set all tongues 
a-wagging, wisely concluded to conform to fashion 
in a trivial matter, in order that he might put his 



32 MY STUDY FIRE. 

whole strength into a struggle on vital principles. 
And yet there is no reason why a great man should 
not indulge in his little idiosyncrasy if he chooses 
to; surely intelligent men and women ought to be 
about better business than commenting on the length 
of Tennyson's hair or the roll of Whitman's coat. 
In a world in which so many people wear the same 
clothes, live in the same house, eat the same dinner, 
and say the same things, blessed are the individ- 
ualities who are not lost in the mob, who have their 
own thoughts and live their own lives. The case 
of the man of genius can be put in a paragraph : 
the conventional people control society; they can 
never understand him; hence the cloud of miscon- 
ception and misrepresentation in which he lives and 
dies. To a man of sensitive temperament this pro- 
cess is often intensely painful; to a man of virile 
temper it is often full of humorous suggestion. 
Gifted men take a certain satirical satisfaction in 
bringing into clear light the innocent ignorance of 
those whose every word of criticism or laudation 
betrayed a complete misconception. The charming 
old story of Sophocles's defense of himself by simply 
reading to the Athenian jury the exquisite choral 
ode on Colonos would sound apocryphal if told of a 
modern jury. The case of Carlyle furnishes a good 
illustration; among all the mass of writing relating 
to this man of genius that has been poured upon a 
defenseless world, it is safe to say that one can 
count on the finders of one hand the articles that 



THE FAILINGS OF GENIUS. 33 

have betrayed any real understanding of the man. 
One readily understands, in the light of this and 
similar past records, the fervor with which Sir Henry 
Taylor reports Tennyson as saying that he thanked 
God with his whole heart and soul that he knew 
nothing, and that the world knew nothing, of Shake- 
speare but his writings ! In these days a man of 
letters takes his life in his hand when he takes up his 
pen; the curse of publicity which attaches itself not 
only to his work but to himself is as comprehensive 
as an Arab imprecation; it covers his ancestry and 
his posterity with impartial malediction. When 
such a dust from rude and curious feet has half 
suffocated one all his life, he must be ready to say 
with the Laureate: 

" Come not, when I am dead, 

To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, 
To trample round my fallen head, 

And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save. 
There let the wind sweep and the plover cry ; 
But thou, go by. 

"Child, if it were thine error or thy crime 
I care no longer, being all unblest ; 
Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time, 

And I desire to rest. 
Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie — 
Go by, go by." 

There is a respect, a deference, a deep and vital 
affection, in which the true man of letters finds one 
of his sweetest and purest rewards; the mind and 
heart which hospitably receive his truest thought 
3 



34 MY STUDY FIRE. 

and honor him for it must always command an 
answering glow of gratitude. It is the vulgar love 
of novelty, publicity, mere cleverness, from which 
the man of genius shrinks. Perhaps the bitterest 
experience in the life of the Teacher of Galilee 
was the eagerness with which the crowds looked for 
miracles, the apathy with which they listened to 
truth. Through the noise and roar of the shallow 
current of popular applause there runs for every 
genuine man of letters a deep, quiet current of 
intelligent sympathy and love which fertilizes his 
life wherever it comes in contact with it. Of this 
true and honest homage to what is best and noblest 
in one's work, Sir Henry Taylor gives an illustra- 
tion : "I met in the train yesterday a meager, sickly, 
peevish-looking, elderly man, not affecting to be 
quite a gentleman. . . . and on showing him the 
photographs of Lionel Tennyson which I carried in 
my hand, he spoke of 'In Memoriam,' and said he 
had made a sort of churchyard of it, and had appro- 
priated some passage of it to each of his departed 
friends, and that he read it every Sunday, and never 
came to the bottom of the depths of it. More to 
be prized this, I thought, than the criticism of 
critics, however plauditory. " 



CHAPTER VI. 

CHRISTMAS EVE. 

The world has been full of mysteries to-day; 
everybody has gone about weighted with secrets. 
The children's faces have fairly shone with expec- 
tancy, and I enter easily into the universal dream 
which at this moment holds all the children of Chris- 
tendom under its spell. Was there ever a wider or 
more loving conspiracy than that which keeps the 
venerable figure of Santa Claus from slipping away, 
with all the other oldtime myths, into the forsaken 
wonderland of the past? Of all the personages 
whose marvelous doings once filled the minds of 
men, he alone survives. He has outlived all the 
great gods, and all the impressive and poetic con- 
ceptions which once flitted between heaven and 
earth ; these have gone, but Santa Claus remains by 
virtue of a common understanding that childhood 
shall not be despoiled of one of its most cherished 
beliefs, either by the mythologist, with his sun myth 
theory, or the scientist, with his heartless diatribe 
against superstition. There is a good deal more 
to be said on this subject, if this were the place to 
say it ; even superstition has its uses, and sometimes, 
its sound heart of truth. He who does not see in 
35 



36 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the legend of Santa Claus a beautiful faith on one 
side, and the nai've embodiment of a divine fact on 
the other, is not fit to have a place at the Christmas 
board. For him there should be neither carol, nor 
holly, nor mistletoe; they only shall keep the feast 
to whom all these things are but the outward and 
visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace. 

Rosalind and myself are thoroughly orthodox 
when it comes to the keeping of holidays ; here at 
least the ways of our fathers are our ways also. 
Orthodoxy generally consists in retaining and em- 
phasizing the disagreeable ways of the fathers, and as 
we are both inclined to heterodoxy on these points, 
we make the more prominent our observance of the 
best of the old time habits. I might preach a pleas- 
ant little sermon just here, taking as my text the 
"survival of the fittest," and illustrating the truth 
from our own domestic ritual ; but the season 
preaches its own sermon, and I should only follow 
the example of some ministers and get between the 
text and my congregation if I made the attempt. 
For weeks we have all been looking forward to this 
eventful evening, and the still more eventful mor- 
row. There have been hurried and whispered con- 
ferences hastily suspended at the sound of a familiar 
step on the stair; packages of every imaginable 
size and shape have been surreptitiously introduced 
into the house, and have immediately disappeared 
in all manner of out-of-the-way places; and for 
several weeks past one room has been constantly 



CHRISTMAS EVE. 37 

under lock and key, visited only when certain sharp- 
sighted eyes were occupied in other directions. 
Through all this scene of mystery Rosalind has 
moved sedately and with sealed lips, the common 
confidant of all the conspirators, and herself the 
greatest conspirator of all. Blessed is the season 
which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of 
love! 

After dinner, eaten, let it be confessed, with more 
haste and less accompaniment of talk than usual, 
the parlor doors were opened, and there stood the 
Christmas tree in a glow of light, its wonderful 
branches laden with all manner of strange fruits not 
to be found in the botanies. The wild shouts, the 
merry laughter, the cries of delight as one coveted 
fruit after another dropped into long-expectant 
arms still linger in my ears now that the little tapers 
are burnt out, the boughs left bare, and the actors 
in the perennial drama are fast asleep, with new 
and strange bedfellows selected from the spoils of 
the night. Cradled between a delightful memory 
and a blissful anticipation, who does not envy them? 

After this charming prelude is over, Rosalind 
comes into the study, and studies for the fortieth 
time the effect of the new design of decoration 
which she has this year worked out, and which gives 
these rather somber rows of books a homelike and 
festive aspect. It pleases me to note the spray of 
holly that obscures the title of Bacon's solemn and 
weighty "Essays," and I get half a page of sugges- 



38 MY STUDY FIRE. 

tions for my notebook from the fact that a sprig of 
mistletoe has fallen on old Burton's "Anatomy of 
Melancholy." Rosalind has reason to be satisfied, 
and if I read her face aright she has succeeded 
even in her own eyes in bringing Christmas, with its 
fragrant memories and its heavenly visions, into the 
study. I cannot help thinking, as I watch her piling 
up the fire for a blaze of unusual splendor, that if 
more studies had their Rosalinds to bring in the 
genial currents of life there would be more cheer 
and hope and large-hearted wisdom in the books 
which the world is reading to-day. 

When the fire has reached a degree of intensity 
and magnitude which Rosalind thinks adequate to 
the occasion, I take down a well-worn volume which 
opens of itself at a well-worn page. It is a book 
which I have read and re-read many times, and 
always with a kindling sympathy and affection for 
the man who wrote it ; in whatever mood I take it 
up there is something in it which touches me with 
a sense of kinship. It is not a great book, but it is 
a book of the heart, and books of the heart have 
passed beyond the outer court of criticism before 
we bestow upon them that phrase of supreme re- 
gard. There are other books of the heart around 
me, but on Christmas Eve it is Alexander Smith's 
" Dreamthorp" which always seems to lie at my 
hand, and when I take it up the well-worn volume 
falls open at the essay on "Christmas." It is a 
good many years since Rosalind and I began to 



CHRISTMAS EVE. 39 

read together on Christmas Eve this beautiful medi- 
tation on the season, and now it has gathered about 
itself such a host of memories that it has become 
part of our common past. It is, indeed, a veritable 
palimpsest, overlaid with tender and gracious recol- 
lections out of which the original thought gains a 
new and subtle sweetness. As I read it aloud I 
know that she sees once more the familiar land- 
scape about Dreamthorp, with the low, dark hill in 
the background, and over it "the tender radiance 
that precedes the moon" ; the village windows are 
all lighted, and the "whole place shines like a con- 
gregation of glowworms." There are the skaters 
still "leaning against the frosty wind" ; there is the 
"gray church tower amid the leafless elms," around 
which the echoes of the morning peal of Christmas 
bells still hover; the village folk have gathered, 
"in their best dresses and their best faces"; the 
beautiful service of the church has been read and 
answered with heartfelt responses, the familiar story 
has been told again simply and urgently, with appli- 
cations for every thankful soul, and then the con- 
gregation has gone to its homes and its festivities. 

All these things, I am sure, lie within Rosalind's 
vision, although she seems to see nothing but the 
ruddy blaze of the fire; all these things I see, as I 
have seen them these many Christmas Eves agone ; 
but with this familiar landscape there are mingled 
all the sweet and sorrowful memories of our com- 
mon life, recalled at this hour that the light of the 



40 MY STUDY FIRE. 

highest truth may interpret them anew in the divine 
language of hope. I read on until I come to the 
quotation from the "Hymn to the Nativity," and 
then I close the book, and take up a copy of Mil- 
ton close at hand. We have had our commemora- 
tion service of love, and now there comes into our 
thought, with the organ roll of this sublime hymn, 
the universal truth which lies at the heart of the 
season. I am hardly conscious that it is my voice 
which makes these words audible : I am conscious 
only of this mighty-voiced anthem, fit for the choral 
song of the morning stars : 

" Ring out, ye crystal spheres, 

And bless our human ears, 
If ye have power to touch our senses so ; 

And let your silver chime 

Move in melodious time ; 
And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow ; 
And, with your ninefold harmony, 
Make up full concert to the angelic symphony. 

" For, if such holy song 

Enwrap our fancy long, 
Time will run back and fetch the age of gold ; 

And speckled vanity 

Will sicken soon and die, 
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mold ; 
And hell itself will pass away, 
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. 

' ' The oracles are dumb, 
No voice or hideous hum 
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving ; 



CHRIS TMA S EVE. 4 r 

Apollo from his shrine 

Can no more divine 
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving, 
No nightly trance or breathed spell 
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 

" The lonely mountains o'er, 

And the resounding shore, 
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament ; 

From haunted spring, and dale 

Edged with poplars pale, 
The parting genius is with sighing sent ; 
With flower-enwoven tresses torn, 
The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn." 

Like a psalm the great Hymn fills the air, and 
like a psalm it remains in the memory. The fire 
has burned low, and a soft and solemn light fills the 
room. Neither of us speaks while the clock strikes 
twelve. I look out of the window. The heavens 
are ablaze with light, and somewhere amid those 
circling constellations I know that a new star has 
found its place, and is shining with such a ray as 
never before fell from heaven to earth. 



CHAPTER VII. 

NEW YEAR'S EVE. 

The last fire of many that have blazed on my 
hearth these twelve months gone is fast sinking into 
ashes. I do not care to revive its expiring flame, 
because I find its slow fading into darkness har- 
monious with the hour and the thought which 
comes with it as the shadow follows the cloud. 
While it is true that our division of time into years 
is purely conventional, and finds no recognition or 
record on the great dial face of the heavens, no man 
can be quite oblivious of it. New Year's eve is 
like every other night ; there is no pause in the 
march of the universe, no breathless moment of 
silence among created things that the passage of 
another twelve months may be noted ; and yet no 
man has quite the same thoughts this evening that 
come with the coming of darkness on other nights. 
The vast and shadowy stream of time sweeps on 
without break, but the traveler who has been journey- 
ing with it cannot be entirely unmindful that he is 
perceptibly nearer the end of his wanderings. It is 
an old story, this irresistible and ceaseless onflow of 
life and time; time always scattering the flowers of 
life with a lavish hand along its course; but each 
42 



NE IV YEAR 'S EVE. 43 

man recalls it for himself and to each it wears some 
new aspect. The vision of Mirza never wholly 
fades from the sight of men. 

From such thoughts as these, which would be 
commonplace enough if it were not for the pathos 
in them, I am recalled by a singular play of the expir- 
ing flames on the titles of my books. Many of 
these are so indistinct that I cannot read them; 
indeed, the farther corners of the room are lost 
entirely in the gloom that is fast gaining on the dying 
light. But there are two rows of books whose 
titles I discover readily as I sit before the fire, and I 
note that they are the great, vital works which 
belong to all races and times ; the books which form 
the richest inheritance of each new generation, and 
which the whole world has come to hold as its best 
possession. In the deepening shadows, and at this 
solitary hour, there is something deeply significant, 
something solemn and consoling, in the great names 
which I read there. A multitude of other names, 
full of light and beauty in their time, have been 
remorselessly swept into oblivion by the fading of 
the light ; at this moment they are as utterly vanished 
as if they had never been. But these other names — 
and I note among them Homer, Dante, Shakes- 
peare, Milton, Goethe, Cervantes — stand out clear 
and familiar amid even the shadows. 

I recall the old maxim of the English common 
law, that no time runs against the king, and I see at 
a glance the deep and wide meaning which escapes 



44 MY STUDY FIRE. 

from the meshes of legal interpretation. Here truly 
are the kings, and to them time is as if it were not. 
It has run against the Greek race and the Greek 
language, but not against Homer; it has run against 
medieval Florence and the Italy just on the thresh- 
old of the Renaissance, but not against Dante; it has 
run against the sturdy England of Elizabeth, but 
not against Shakespeare. All are dead save the 
kings, and when one remembers what they have 
outlived of power and wealth and learning and 
civilization, one feels that here are the inheritors 
of immortality. A library is, more truly than any 
other place to which men may go, a place of refuge 
against time. Not that time does not come here ; 
those forgotten names on the upper shelves bear 
witness to its power ; but here, at least, are some 
whose serene faces have the majesty of a work of 
Phidias ; that large, calm, penetrating look of 
immortality of the elder kings when they stood in 
unbroken line with the gods. Every library which 
has its poets' corner — and what library has not? — 
possesses the memorials of royalty more truly than 
Westminster itself; more really, in fact, because 
these kings are not dead. They sway a mightier 
host today than ever before, and the boundaries of 
their common realm are also the frontier lines of 
civilization. In such company the passage of time 
is, after all, a thing of little account. It destroys 
only the imperfect, the partial, the limited, the 
transitory ; here are the truths over which time has 



NEW YEAR'S EVE. 45 

no power, because they are part of that eternity to 
which it is itself tributary. And just here is the 
secret of the immortality which these kings have 
inherited ; they have passed through all the appear- 
ances«of things, the passing symbols and the imper- 
fect embodiments of truth to truth itself, which is 
contemporaneous with every age and race. Time 
destroys only the symbols and the inadequate expres- 
sion of truth, but it is powerless to touch truth. The 
writers who were once famous and now forgotten 
were men who caught the aspect of the hour and 
gave it graceful or forceful expression; but when 
the hour passed, the book which grew out of it went 
with it as the flower goes with the season which 
saw its blossoming. The book of the moment often 
has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which 
comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; 
but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see 
its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it 
finds its final resting-place in the garret or the 
auction room. 

The conviction deepens in me year by year that 
the best possible education which any man can 
acquire is a genuine and intimate acquaintance with 
these few great minds who have escaped the wrecks 
of time and have become, with the lapse of years, a 
kind of impersonal wisdom, summing up the com- 
mon experience of the race and distilling it drop by 
drop into the perfect forms of art. The man who 
knows his Homer thoroughly knows more about the 



46 MY STUDY FIRE. 

Greeks than he who has familiarized himself with 
all the work of the archaeologist and philologist and 
historians of the Homeric age; the man who has 
mastered Dante has penetrated the secret of medie- 
valism ; the man who counts Shakespeare as his 
friend can afford to leave most other books about 
Elizabeth's England unread. To really know 
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe is to know 
the best the world has thought and said and done, 
is to enter into that inheritance of experience and 
knowledge which is the truest, and at bottom the 
only, education. Most of us know too many writ- 
ers, and waste our strength in a vain endeavor to 
establish relations of intimacy with a multitude of 
men, great and small, who profess to have some 
claim upon us. It is both pleasant and wise to 
have a large acquaintance, to know life broadly and 
at its best ; but our intimate friends can never, in 
the nature of things, be many. We may know a 
host of interesting people, but we can really live 
with but a few. And it is these few and faithful 
ones whose names I see in the dying light of the old 
year and the first faint gleam of the new. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

a scholar's dream. 

The delicate hands of the little clock on the man- 
tel indicated that thirty minutes had passed since 
the musical chimes within had rung eleven. The 
open fire below was burning brightly, for the flame 
had eaten into the heart of the back log, and was 
transmuting its slow, rich growth into a warm glow 
that touched the outlines of the room with a soft 
splendor and made a charming picture of its mingled 
lights and shadows. The learning of the world 
rose tier above tier on the shelves that filled the 
space between floor and ceiling, and following the 
lines of gold lettering along the unbroken rows one 
read august and imperial names in the kingdom of 
thought. An ample writing-table, piled high with 
pamphlets and books, stood in the center of the 
room, and the loose sheets of paper carelessly thrown 
together gave evidence of a work only recently in- 
terrupted. Without, the solemn silence of midnight 
and the radiant stars brooded over the stainless 
fields, white with freshly fallen snow. 

Ralph Norton had been looking into the fire these 
thirty minutes, in a meditation that was almost 
wholly pathetic. His seventy years passed in swift 
47 



4^ MY STUDY FIRE. 

procession before him, coming up one by one out of 
the invisible past, and pronouncing an inaudible 
judgment upon his career. There was a presence 
of indefinable and unusual solemnity in the time, 
for it was the close of a century, and in a brief half- 
hour another hundred years would be rounded to 
completion. By the common judgment of the 
thinking world, Ralph Norton was the foremost 
man of his age; no other had felt its doubts so 
keenly, or drank in its inspiration with such a 
mighty thirst as he. His thought had searched into 
its secret places and mastered all its wisdom ; his 
heart had felt its deep pulsations in the solitude of 
unbroken and heroic studies ; his genius had given 
its spirit a voice of matchless compass and eloquence. 
For half a century the world had laid his words to 
heart, and built its faith upon his thinking. While 
the busy tides of activity ebbed and flowed through 
the great channels of civilization, he had lived apart 
in a deep, earnest, and whole-hearted consecration to 
truth. The clearly cut features, the keen, benignant 
eyes, the noble poise of head, the wistful expression 
as of one striving to pierce the heart of some mys- 
tery, were signs of a personality that had left its 
impress on two generations, and now, in its grand 
maturity, was still waiting for some larger fulfill- 
ment of the promise of life. Behind him, among 
the throng of books, indistinguishable in the dim 
light, were the works into which the life of his life 
had gone. They recorded explorations into many 



A SCHOLAR'S DUE AM. 49 

fields, they had torn down old faiths amid storms of 
discussion and condemnation, they had laid new 
foundations for belief in the silence of meditative and 
self-forgetful years. The strength and the weak- 
ness of the age had written themselves upon those 
pages, in the ebbing of inherited belief and the in- 
flow of convictions born out of new insight into and 
new contact with the experiences of life. 

The old man sat motionless, with his eyes fixed on 
the slow moving hands ; he seemed to be number- 
ing the brief moments of his unfinished career. The 
century which had spoken through him was ebbing 
to its last second, and as it sank silently into the gulf 
of years his own thought seemed to pause in its dar- 
ing flight, his own voice to sink into silence. The 
age and its master had done their work, and now, 
in the dim light of a room over which the spirit of 
the one had brooded and in which the brain and 
hand of the other had wrought, they were about to 
separate. The delicate hands moved on without 
consciousness of the mighty life whose limits they 
were fast registering, the stars looked down from 
the eternity in which they shone unmindful of the 
change from era to era, the world of men was re- 
mote and unconscious; the old man was alone with 
the sinking fire and the passing century. The min- 
ute hand moved on, the fire flashed up fitfully and 
sank down in ashes, there was a moment of hush, 
and then slowly and solemnly the chimes in the lit- 
tle clock rang twelve. Norton shivered as if a sud- 



5° MY STUDY FIRE. 

den chill had struck him, and peal on peal through 
the midnight air the bells rang in a new century. 

The man who had worked as few men work, and 
yet had shown no signs of breaking, felt strangely- 
old in a moment, and the carol of the bells, flinging 
across the hills their jubilant welcome of the new 
time, struck on his inner ear like a requiem for a 
past that was irrevocably gone. In an instant life 
lost its familiar and homelike aspect, the impalpa- 
ble presence of the new century rose like a vast 
empty house through which no human feet had 
walked, in which no human hearts had beat, over 
which no atmosphere of hope and love and dear old 
usage hung warm and genial. Norton had become 
a stranger ; his citizenship had gone with the age 
which had conferred it ; his friendships seemed dim 
and ghostly, like myths out of which the currents 
of life had ebbed. With a sinking heart, groping 
like one suddenly become blind for some familiar 
thing, he turned and looked at the row of books be- 
hind him upon whose covers his name was stamped. 
In the receding world that was swiftly moving 
away from him they alone remained faithful. 

"My life is but a breath," he said, as his eye fell 
upon them; "but thought does not die, and here I 
have written my own immortality. Here is the rec- 
ord of all I have felt and thought and done. These 
books are myself ; and though I perish I live again. ' ' 

The old man's eye ran down the line, and re- 
called, as it fell upon volume after volume, how 



A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 51 

each had grown into being. Here were books of 
keen, open-eyed and tireless observation, into which 
had gone years of unbroken study of external life, 
with such fruitful results as come to the man of 
trained faculty, of deep insight and of heroic pa- 
tience. Here were works of daring speculation that 
had traversed the whole realm of knowledge and 
struck luminous lines of order through many an out- 
lying darkness. Upon these volumes Norton's eye 
rested with peculiar delight ; those which had gone 
before were only his careful reports of the world 
without him, these were the mighty lines into which 
he had put his meditations on the problems of the 
universe; these were the utterance of his ripest 
thought, the fruitage of his best hours, the outcome 
of his long training, his laborious studies, his whole 
thoughtful life. In these books he knew that the 
vanished century had written itself most deeply and 
truly. Here were the eloquent lines in which its 
very soul seemed to burn with self-revealing splen- 
dor; here were its affirmations and its negations; 
here was, in a word, the sum and substance of that 
individual thought, spirit, sentiment, which made 
it different from the centuries that went before and 
would forever keep it distinct and apart from the 
centuries that were to follow. 

At the end of the shelf was a thin volume, modest, 
unpretentious, almost trivial beside the greater 
works around it. The light of pride faded out of 
the old man's eyes when they rested upon this little 



52 MY STUDY FIRE. 

book, and a deep, unutterable pathos filled them 
with unshed tears. There had been one year of his 
prosperous life when the light of the sun was dark- 
ened and the beauty of the heavens overhung with 
clouds ; one year when his habits of investigation 
had been cast aside ; when thinking mocked him 
with its insufficiency and the search for truth seemed 
idle and unreal; one year when the sorrows of his 
own heart rolled like billows over the pursuits of 
his mind, over the aims of his career, and rose until 
they threatened the whole universe in which he 
lived. He ceased to observe, to speculate, and 
only felt. The training of the schools, the long dis- 
cipline of his maturity, the gifts and acquisitions of 
which lifted him above his fellow, seemed to vanish 
out of his life and left him only human ; he was one 
with the vast throng about him who were toiling, 
loving, suffering and dying under all the manifold 
experiences of humanity. In that year there was 
much that was sacred and incommunicable, much 
that had receded into the silence of his deeper self; 
but months later, when the agony of grief had spent 
itself and the passion and bitterness had gone, while 
the heart was yet tender and tremulous with sympa- 
thy, this little book had been born. It was a tran- 
scription of experience ; there were training, culture, 
deep thought on every page, but these were fused, 
vitalized, humanized by suffering, by struggle, by 
aspiration. It was a chapter out of living history; 
the mind of the universe was there in hint and sug- 



A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 53 

gestion of bold thought, but the heart of the uni- 
verse was still more truly there in hushed pulsations. 

Norton rose from his chair and took the book 
from its place on the shelf. Its covers were worn 
as if with much handling, its pages bore evidence of 
frequent reading, and as the leaves fell apart in his 
hand tender and sorrowful memories came back to 
the lonely old man with a strange pathos. He held 
the worn book almost reverently, the music of un- 
forgotten years sounded again in his soul, buried 
hopes rose from their sepulchers and were radiant 
with life and promise as of old, love that had been 
groping and waiting in the shadows of eternity these 
many years once more had vision of vanished faces, 
and all the sweet use and habit of happy days re- 
turned with their precious ministries. Norton 
opened page after page of the past as he turned 
page after page of the little book. 

"The world cares little for this," he said to him- 
self at last, as he returned it to its place ; "this is 
only for me ; time will leave it with the age which 
saw its birth, as a thing too trivial and personal to 
be carried on the march." 

Then he sat down once more, gathered the few 
coals together, blew them into a little glow and re- 
kindled the dead fire. The bells had long been 
silent and the first hour of the new age was already 
spent. The old man watched the fire as it rose 
cheerfully out of the ashes of the earlier burning, 
receiving the touch of flame from it and then send- 



54 MY STUDY FIRE. 

ing out its own new glow and heat. Out of this 
simple process, which he had watched a thousand 
times before, a truth seemed to take form and pro- 
ject itself far on into the coming time. The past 
slowly drifted out of his thought, which moved for- 
ward as if to discover what lay behind the veil of 
the future. The low, monotonous ticking of the 
little clock became, in his ears, the audible pulsa- 
tions of time. At first the beats were slow and far 
apart, but as he listened they seemed to multiply, 
the minutes swiftly lengthened into hours, the hours 
ran into years, and the years moved on silently into 
centuries. 

Almost without surprise Norton felt that two 
centuries had gone. He turned from the fire on 
which his gaze had been fixed and looked about the 
room. It was still the working room of a man of 
letters, but it was strangely changed. Books rose as 
formerly from floor to ceiling in unbroken ranks, 
but Norton, whose knowledge of literature had been 
so exact and comprehensive, knew barely one of the 
names stamped on the backs. His eye ran anx- 
iously along the titles, and when it rested upon a 
familiar name he found but a tithe of the works 
which he had once known. Here and there a soli- 
tary volume greeted him like a friend in a crowd of 
strange faces. He searched for books that had been 
his hourly companions and discovered only here and 
there a single thin volume, the sole residuum of a 
system of thought. With a pathetic interest he read 



A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 55 

the names that were meaningless to him, and taking 
down one of the strange volumes opened it at ran- 
dom. The first sentence that met his eye was a 
quotation from himself, the second commented upon 
his thought as an illustration of the crude methods 
and untrustworthy results of earlier observers. 
"This writer from whom I have quoted," the au- 
thor went on to say, "was a man whose integrity of 
mind was unquestioned by his contemporaries and 
must be undoubted by us, but, in the light of later 
research, it is difficult to understand how so keen 
an intellect could have mistaken so entirely the evi- 
dent teaching of fact." Norton closed the book 
with a sinking heart. The theory held up as a con- 
spicuous error was one upon which he had spent 
years of thought, and upon which his fame had 
largely rested. 

He took down another volume and opened it also 
at random. He read the first page carefully, and 
with a growing confusion of thought. There were 
sentences which he could understand, but the page 
was incomprehensible to him. He read it more 
slowly and with an instinctive perception that it was 
a piece of close reasoning, but its meaning wholly 
eluded him. He caught glimpses of it and then it 
slipped away into mystery again. The writer's 
standpoint was so novel that he could not readily 
reach it; natural processes and forces were sug- 
gested of which he was entirely ignorant. He 
opened book after book with the same result ; a 



56 MY STUDY FIRE. 

feeling of unutterable solitude came over him as it 
slowly dawned upon him that two centuries inter- 
vened between his thought and that of the men 
whose works were gathered around him. He was an 
alien in an age which had no place for him; a stran- 
ger in a world out of which all familiar objects had 
vanished. 

At last he remembered his own work, and searched 
eagerly from case to case for the books into which 
he had poured the wealth of his mental life. Not 
a single volume was there, and the old thinker 
turned away with a despairing sigh. 

"With all my conscience, my self-denial, my 
toil, I lived in vain," he said to himself. Then, 
feeling for a moment the force of an old habit, he 
drew a chair up to the writing-table and sat down. 
He grew more and more confused; the very titles 
on the pamphlets scattered over the table were in- 
comprehensible to him. He glanced at the fire, and 
its flames were strange; they were fed by some 
material unknown to him ; the old familiar world 
had drifted hopelessly away. 

Upon the writing-table lay a little volume with a 
few freshly written sheets folded between its pages. 
Norton opened the book mechanically, and then, 
with a suddenly aroused interest, turned quickly 
from page to page. The sight of the words was like 
the sound of a familiar voice in the darkness, or the 
opening of a window upon some familiar landscape. 
A soft light came into his eyes and his face flushed 



A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 57 

with inexpressible happiness. The little book was 
his own thought and speech ; not the outcome of 
his speculation and research, but the utterance of 
his one year of deep interior life. He glanced 
through it lovingly as one would read the soul of a 
friend, catching here and there some well-remem- 
bered sentence, some word stamped in the fire of 
his great trial, some phrase wrung out of his very 
soul. It mattered little to him now that the great 
works out of which he had thought to build an 
earthly immortality had vanished ; this deepest and 
truest word of his soul, this most vital and genuine 
outcome of his life, had survived the touch of time 
and still spoke to a living generation. As he turned 
from page to page the loose sheets slipped from the 
book upon the table. They had evidently been re- 
cently written, and seemed to be personal reflections 
rather than any formal composition. 

"I have come to a place in my life," said the un- 
known writer, "from which I look back upon the 
past as one looks over a long course from the sum- 
mit that commands it all. I have attained a great 
age and great honors, as the world counts honors, 
knowing perfectly that achievements are relative, 
not positive, and that I am simply less ignorant, not 
more learned, than my fellows. I find myself every- 
where spoken of and written about as the first man 
of the age, its voice, prophet, interpreter, and what 
not, with a keen sense of the poverty of a century 
that can read its deepest thought in aught that I 



5 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

have said or written. I have given my life to the 
search for truth ; I have traveled here and there for 
new outlooks; I have withdrawn into deep seclu- 
sions for new insights; I have questioned all the 
sciences that have grown to such vast proportions, 
and tell us so fully and so accurately of the methods 
of being, but leave us as much in the dark as ever 
concerning its secret; I have drank deep at the 
fountains of ancient learning; I have studied all 
literatures and looked long and earnestly into the 
soul of man in the revelation of books. In a word, 
I have traversed the whole world of knowledge, and 
now, at the summit of my years, with such rewards 
as the reverence of all men can give me. I return to 
the point whence I set out. The universe still 
sweeps beyond me vaster and remoter for all my 
struggle to master it, the illimitable abysses are 
more awful because I have looked into them, the 
mystery of life is more insoluble because I have 
striven to pierce it. I have simply learned to live 
my own personal life with fortitude, patience, and 
trust. 

"In my youth I came upon this little book, and 
was deeply moved by the disclosure of a suffering 
soul I found in it, by its unforced and unstudied 
depth of feeling, by the intensity of its humanity, 
by its agony, its love, and its faith. I learned it 
almost by heart, and then I passed on into studies 
and speculations which seemed to dwarf it by their 
vastness. But I come back again to the goal from 



A SCHOLAR'S DREAM. 59 

which I set out, to the guide who first opened the 
depths of my life, and who, through his own suffer- 
ing, found the pathway into the heart of the mys- 
tery which I have missed in all my searching. When 
I remember how earnestly men have striven to think 
their way into the secrets of the universe, and how 
certainly they have failed, I see clearly that only he 
who lives into truth finds it, and that love alone is 
immortal." 

Here the writing ended, and Norton felt himself 
in the presence of a mind as great and as sincere as 
his own. He replaced the loose sheets in the vol- 
ume and laid the little book in its place; in his joy 
that any impulse from his own heart had touched 
and inspired another across the gulf of years he had 
found the true immortality. The fire had burned 
out, and as he bent over it to find some live coal 
among the ashes, the little clock on the mantel 
chimed two, and with a start he found himself in 
his own study. 



CHAPTER IX. 

A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD. 

We have been sitting to-night before a fire of 
driftwood, and, as the many-colored flames have 
shot up, flickered, and gone out, thought has made 
all manner of vagrant journeyings. Rosalind has 
occasionally commented on some splendid tongue 
of fire, but for the most part we have been silent. 
There are nights — nodes ambrosiamz — when inspir- 
ing talk, that nectar of the gods, has held us long 
and made us reluctant to cover the smoldering 
embers. There are other nights when we fall under 
some spell of silence, and the world without us stirs 
into strange vividness the world within, and the 
chief importance of things visible and tangible seem 
to be their power to loosen thought and set it free 
to spread its wings in the empyrean. When one 
falls into this mood and sits slippered and at ease 
before the crooning fire, while the wintry winds are 
trumpeting abroad, one easily comprehends the 
charm of Oriental mysticism ; the charm of unbroken 
silence in which one pursues and at last overtakes 
himself. The world has vanished like a phantasma- 
goria; duties and cares and responsibilities have 
gone with the material relations and pursuits which 
60 



A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD. 6 1 

gave them birth; one is alone with himself, and 
within the invisible horizons of his own thought all 
mysteries are hidden and revealed. I have often 
thought that if I ever turn heretic I shall be a fire- 
worshiper. These volatile flames have immense 
powers of disintegration; one can imagine the visi- 
ible universe crumbling into ashes at their touch. 
But when they dance before the eye the disintegra- 
tion they effect has something of the miracle of crea- 
tion in it ; so alive does the imagination become when 
this glow touches it, so swift is thought to pursue 
and overtake that which entirely eludes it by the 
light of day! I can hardly imagine myself sitting 
motionless in broad daylight, in the unbroken 
calm of an anticipated Nirvana; but I can easily 
fancy myself under the perpetual spell of the fire 
spirit dreaming forever of worlds in which I have 
never lived. 

The peculiar fascination of a driftwood fire is 
partly material and partly imaginative. The bril- 
liancy of the flame, the unexpected transformations 
of color, the swift movement of the restless waves 
of fire from log to log, the sudden splendor of hue 
breaking out of smoky blackness — all these material 
features supplement the unfailing association of the 
fagots themselves. They have no audible speech to 
report their journeyings, but the tropical richness of 
the flame which consumes them hints at all manner 
of strange wanderings in remote and strange parts of 
the earth. The secret of the sea where it breaks, 



62 ' MY STUDY FIRE. 

phosphorescent, on the islands of the equator, seems 
to be hiding itself within those weird, bewildering 
flames. One feels as if he were near the mystery 
of that vast, dim life of the great seas so alien from 
all save the kindred solitariness and majesty of the 
heavens ; one feels as if something deeper and 
stranger than articulate life were revealing itself 
before him, if he but had the wit to understand it. 
This vast, silent world which girdles our little world 
of speech and action, as the great seas hold some 
island locked in their immeasurable wastes — is it not 
this sublime background of mystery which gives our 
books, our art, our achievements, their deepest and 
most pathetic meaning? One lays down a great 
book with a penetrating sense of its inadequacy. 
Judged by any human standard, we recognize its 
noble completeness ; but measured against the world 
of suffering which it portrays, how like a solitary star 
it shines out of gulfs of impenetrable darkness! 
Scholars are still discussing the problem which 
Shakespeare presented in "Hamlet"; but as one 
takes up the tragedy in some moment of deeper 
insight and becomes suddenly conscious in his own 
thought of its deeper significance, becomes suddenly 
aware of the outlying gloom in which the poet's 
torch is swallowed up, how small the question 
of real or feigned insanity becomes! The slow 
transformation of purpose into action has never 
been more completely or more marvelously told 
than in "The Ring and the Book." Never before 



A FLAME OF DRIFTWOOD. 63 

have the secret processes of different minds been 
studied with such intensity of insight and brought 
to light with such vividness and splendor of expres- 
sion. But when Count Guido and Pompilia and 
Caponsacchi and the Pope have each told their 
story, is it not the finest result of Browning's art that 
the pathos of the tragedy oppresses us as something 
still unexpressed, something essentially inexpress- 
ible? The secret of every great work of art is its 
power to send the imagination to search for itself 
in the dim world out of which it comes, never as a 
perfect creation, but always as a witness to the 
existence of something greater than itself. Our 
noblest words and works are to the great realities 
which they strive to reveal what the text-books of 
astronomy are to the immeasurable heavens of which 
they speak. It would be a poor world if any genius 
of man could fathom it and any language of man 
express it ! 

As the driftwood fire flickers and dances, I seem 
to feel about me the vast, dim seas whose hidden 
splendor it has brought into my study, and touched 
the oldest books with a new association, with a deep 
and strange suggestiveness. How imperfect are the 
most famous of these transcriptions of the soul and 
the wonderful world through which it travels; and 
yet how marvelously true and deep they are! Like 
these fagots, carelessly gathered on the beach, they 
have caught the secret of the fathomless deeps, and 
they are touched with a beauty not their own. 



CHAPTER X. 

DREAM WORLDS. 

Rosalind is not always quite sure that my occu- 
pations are entirely profitable. I notice at times an 
uncertain expression in her face when she finds me 
brooding over some old myth for hours together. I 
am conscious of a disapproval which is rarely ex- 
pressed, but which is none the less unmistakable in 
a nature so unflinchingly and uncompromisingly hon- 
est. I do not mean that Rosalind has no liking for 
fables or old legends. On the contrary, I have 
heard her read the "Tanglewood Tales" and "Won- 
der Book" so many times to the children that I 
associate certain clear tones of her voice and certain 
characteristic accentuations with passages in the 
story of Midas and of Perseus. Rosalind's doubt is 
in regard to the great value which I attach to these 
venerable fictions, and to the very considerable time 
I often devote to them. Last night, after I had given 
the fire a rattling overhauling, and had settled back 
again in my chair to further reading of a new and 
fascinating book of popular tales, I noticed the faint- 
est possible skepticism in Rosalind's face. Rosa- 
lind sometimes permits herself to suspect that I 
am wasting a day, and I fear there are occasional 
64 



DREAM WORLDS. 65 

grounds for such a suspicion. There are days when 
the mind refuses to be put to any service; it lounges 
about according to its mood, and yields neither to 
persuasion nor to command. At such times I find 
myself obliged to keep my mind company, and I 
have no sense of responsibility for wasted time. 

I am by no means certain that such days are lost; 
I am rather of opinion that they are days of special 
fertility, and that the mind comes back from its 
wanderings quickened and enriched by new con- 
tacts with life and truth. While Goldsmith was 
playing his flute for rustic dances in French villages, 
he was storing up impressions and experiences that 
were to add a flavor to all his later work. But this 
reaction of the mind against routine, or against work 
of any kind, is not so much what I am thinking 
about now as that kind of fruitful dreaming out of 
which myths, legends, and imaginary creations of all 
sorts spring. It is surprising to find how many of 
the greatest works of literature have their roots in 
this withdrawal from the actual in order that the ideal 
may be approached and possessed. Last evening, 
when I noticed the faint touch of skepticism on 
Rosalind's face, I was quite ready to defend myself ; 
in fact, that charming woman often tells me that I 
defend myself when no attack is intended ; and this, 
I have no doubt, she recognizes as a slight stirring 
of conscience on my part, and so receives fresh con- 
firmation of her suspicions. I long ago recognized 
the fact that, as all roads lead to Rome, so do all 
5 



66 MY STUDY FIRE. 

devices end in disaster when the woman who knows 
one best is concerned. Peter the Great finally- 
learned the secret of victory at the hands of the foes 
who so long defeated him ; but in the peaceful war- 
fare which I have in mind, he is the wisest man who 
learns soonest that defeat is inevitable, and that 
resignation is the single flower that blooms on these 
well-contested fields. There are times when victory 
seems assured ; one is armed at all points, and has 
made the most careful disposition of his forces. 
The enemy seems to have a foreboding of defeat; 
there is a lack of spirit in her resistance ; she soon 
yields and draws one on, careless and confident. 
Suddenly there is a portentous change; the right 
wing is turned and flying, the left wing follows suit; 
the center is seized with sudden panic, and gives 
way at the first attack. The reserve is brought up, 
and promptly routed, and one retires at last from 
the field, not sullen, but dazed, confused, and 
hopelessly perplexed. By every known law of 
military science he ought to have held his ground 
and routed the foe ; his arguments were overpower- 
ing, his facts invincible ; nevertheless he is a soli- 
tary fugitive. Those who have not gone through 
the experience will doubt this record of it ; those 
who have passed through its varied phases will 
instantly recognize its fidelity to nature, and will 
decline to confirm it ; there is a conspiracy of silence 
on this subject among those who have fallen victims 
to rash confidence in their powers. It must be 



DREAM WORLDS. 67 

added that nothing can exceed the delicacy of 
behavior on the part of the victor on such occasions. 
It is only by a little increase of color, an irrepress- 
ible light in the eye, that the consciousness of suc- 
cess is betrayed. Friendly relations are immediately 
resumed, and one is even deluded into the convic- 
tion that his defeat was more apparent than real, 
and that in disaster his own greatness has become 
more evident, and been instantly recognized. This 
is a delightful feeling, and it survives as long as it 
remains unexpressed. 

This is a long digression, but an open fire sings 
as many tunes as one has moods, and I make no 
apology for rambling from my subject. At that 
very moment Goethe's "Autobiography" lay open 
in Rosalind's lap; I gently disentangled it from 
some of that ornamental work which fringes all a 
woman's occupations, and read the legend of the 
poet's youth which he calls "The New Paris." 
Goethe learned very early to tell stories acceptably ; 
he came naturally by an art in which his mother 
excelled, of whom he says — 

"Von Mtitterchen die Frohnatur 
Und Lust zu fabuliren." 

His playfellows were constantly entertained by the 
recitals of his marvelous adventures, and they were 
delighted especially with his report of a certain 
garden into which he found his way through a gate 
in the city walls, and within whose magical boun- 



68 MY STUDY FIRE. 

daries all manner of strange things were seen by 
the adventurous boy. This was told so often and 
with such circumstantiality that it was accepted as 
fact not only by the listeners, but by the narrator 
himself. Each boy privately visited the part of the 
wall where the gate was supposed to be, and each 
found confirmation of the story. There were even 
warm discussions as to the exact position of certain 
wholly imaginary things which each one had seen. 

Every one who has the privilege of being intrusted 
with the confidences of children knows that the 
imagination has an equal power with reality over 
them. They make imaginary or dream worlds, and 
sustain them by an unbroken faith until the light 
of knowledge slowly and sadly disintegrates them. 
The mind dreams, and creates worlds out of its 
dreams, as naturally and as inevitably as it observes 
and learns real things. 

It is not surprising that a kinsman of one of the 
greatest dreamers of modern times should have been 
the architect of one of these ideal worlds. Hartley 
Coleridge believed fully that some day a stream 
would break out of the soil of a neighboring meadow, 
and that along its swiftly created banks a new race 
would find its home and a new life organize itself. 
This was no vague dream; it was so real, so definite, 
and so continuous that the boy knew its geography 
as well as that of the country about it, and even 
made an accurate map of it. This secret possession 
of Hartley's imagination was shared by his brother 



DREAM WORLDS. 69 

Derwent, and for years the two boys watched the 
growth of nations in this invisible continent, the 
evolution of national institutions, religions, and 
laws; they were spectators of battles and civic con- 
flicts; they knew the private histories of the great 
generals and statesmen who arose from time to time ; 
and in the long course of years they saw radical and 
far-reaching changes of government and society. 
Everybody remembers the ideal empire of Gom- 
broon which De Quincey ruled in his youth, and the 
government of which, in an evil hour, he divided 
with his elder brother. The latter took such an 
aggressive attitude toward the people of Gombroon 
that the younger ruler was obliged to make a long 
and desperate struggle to preserve their indepen- 
dence. Things at length came to such a pass that, 
in order to defeat the machinations of an unscrupu- 
lous enemy, the creator of the invisible empire had 
to face the question of destroying it. "Ah, but no! 
I had contracted obligations to Gombroon ; I had 
submitted my conscience to a yoke, and in secret 
truth my will had no such autocratic power. Long 
contemplation of a shadow, earnest study for the 
welfare of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded 
sensibilities of that shadow under accumulated 
wrongs — these bitter experiences, nursed by brood- 
ing thought, had gradually frozen that shadow into 
a rigor of reality far denser than the material reali- 
ties of brass or granite." 

Such records of imaginative childhood as these 



7° MY STUDY FIRE. 

might be multiplied indefinitely ; they register not 
so much isolated activities as an inevitable and nor- 
mal stage of development. It is a theory of mine 
that childhood contains in the germ all that matu- 
rity ever develops or displays, and I find particular 
illustration of this in the persistence and splendor 
with which this faculty of ideal creation has worked 
in the literature of the world. For instance — it 
occurs to me just here that I have wholly failed to 
report the discussion between Rosalind and myself 
which arose when I laid down the poker and set- 
tled back in the easy-chair. I think it wisest, upon 
the whole, to leave that conversation unrecorded, 
but I hope no one will connect this decision on my 
part with what I have written in a strictly general 
way about such discussions. 



CHAPTER XI. 

A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 

Rosalind has given me a text this evening. She 
was reading Sidney's "Defense of Poesy," and, as 
a contribution to a talk we had been having on 
poetry, she read these words aloud: "Since, then, 
poetry is of all human learnings the most ancient and 
of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other 
learnings have taken their beginnings ; since it is so 
universal that no learned nation doth despise it, nor 
barbarous nation is without it; since both Roman 
and Greek gave such divine names unto it, the one 
of prophesying, the other of making, and that indeed 
that name of making is fit for it, considering, that 
where all other arts retain themselves within their 
subject, and receive, as it were, their being from it, 
the poet only, only bringeth his own stuff, and doth 
not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter 
for a conceit ... I think, and think I think rightly, 
the laurel crown appointed for triumphant captains 
doth worthily, of all other learnings, honor the poet's 
triumph." These were familiar words, but they 
fitted my mood so perfectly that I seemed to be 
hearing them for the first time. I had spent the 
whole day in a world which a great poet had formed 
7i 



72 MY STUDY FIRE. 

out of the stuff of his imagination ; a world sub- 
limely ordered, as I looked into it, by the harmony 
of the imagination and the practical reason ; the 
one building out of unsubstantial thought and touch- 
ing with a bewildering and elusive beauty, the other 
molding the structure to human needs and shaping 
it to human ends. The day made some escape from 
its somber realities almost inevitable. Since early 
morning the rain had fallen ceaselessly, with a 
melancholy monotone that beat on one's heart. 
Even the cheerful notes of the fire, singing lustily as 
if to exorcise the demon of gloom and ennui, failed 
to shut out the steady murmur of the water falling 
from the leaden skies. Against such invasions of 
darkness there is always a refuge in the imagination, 
and I fled early to that nameless island in the un- 
discovered sea where Shakespeare's "Tempest" 
finds its sublime stage. Under the spell of this 
magical vision I had forgotten lowering skies and 
leaden-footed hours, and I was still in Shakespeare's 
world when Rosalind read the words from the "De- 
fense of Poesy" which I have quoted. 

I had but to stretch my hand to a shelf at my 
side to match the immortal young Elizabethan with 
the deeper eloquence of the Greek thinker whose 
speculations so often lead into the fields of poetry. 
It is to the well-worn words of Socrates to Ion that 
I open and read: "As the Corybantian revelers, 
when they dance, are not in their right mind, so 
the lyric poets are not in their right mind when 



A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 73 

they are composing their beautiful strains : but 
when falling under the power of music and meter 
they are inspired and possessed, like Bacchic maid- 
ens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when 
they are under the influence of Dionysius, but not 
when they are in their right mind. And the soul of 
the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves tell 
us ; for they tell us that they gather their strains 
from honeyed fountains out of the gardens and dells 
of the Muses ; thither, like the bees, they wing their 
way. And this is true. For the poet is a light and 
winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in 
him until he has been inspired, and is out of his 
senses, and the mind is no longer in him. . . . For 
in this way the' God would seem to indicate to us, 
and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems 
are not human or the work of man, but divine and 
the word of God ; and that the poets are only the 
interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally 
possessed." 

One needs nowadays to reinforce his faith in the 
ancient supremacy of the imagination by some such 
words as these from those masters of the higher rea- 
son who have established the reality of their faith 
by the sublimity and substance of their works. It 
is as idle to question the authority of the imagination 
in the presence of Shakespeare's "Tempest," or 
Plato's 'Ton" or "Phsedo," as to dispute the reality 
of music while Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony" or 
Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" hold us silent and 



74 MY STUDY FIRE. 

responsive to we know not what unspoken messages 
from some vaster world. It is not a matter of 
demonstration, of evidence or proof or logical de- 
duction ; it is always and only a flash of intelligence 
through the spiritual sense. Well says Abt Vogler 
in Robert Browning's wonderful exposition of the 
whole matter : 

"Why rushed the discords on, but that harmony should be 
prized ? 
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear ; 

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and 
the woe ; 
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear ; 
The rest may reason, and welcome ; 'tis we musicians 
know." 

Literary epochs come and go, forms of expression 
change, but the method of the true poet remains 
the same ; he does not reason — he sees, he hears, 
he knows. The reality of the Ideal, of the Spiritual, 
is never an open question with him; when it be- 
comes one he ceases to be a poet. Skepticism 
which stimulates science blights poetry ; the doubt 
which sends the mind restlessly abroad destroys in 
the same moment the home in which are the sources 
of its joy and its inspiration. Nothing in life is quite 
so pathetic as the artist who clings to his work after 
he has begun to question its authority and validity. 
The toil remains, but the unspeakable joy of it is 
gone; and so also is that chance of possible perfec- 
tion for the winning of which genius never hesitates 



A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 75 

to stake its all. It were better that the painters 
who doubt whether it is worth while to paint, and 
the musicians who question the sincerity of their 
art, and the poets who are haunted with the fear 
that the day of verse has gone, should refrain from 
all endeavor, and the world wait for the sure hands 
and the ringing voices that must bring back the 
Ideal once more as certainly as the birds of April 
will announce the summer, coming swiftly northward 
with leaf for tree, and flower for stalk, and green 
for brown, and the splendor of overflowing light for 
days that are brief and shadowed. It is easy to 
deny the existence of that which one does not and 
cannot see, and this must be the cloak of charity 
which one casts over those who write the epitaph of 
the Imagination and record with funereal reiteration 
the decline and disappearance of poetry. They do 
not write poetry: therefore poetry has ceased to be. 
Its sublime course runs out in a thin ripple of musi- 
cal verse which only makes the glitter of the bare 
sand beneath the more' obtrusive. There is a sure 
refuge from all these faint and querulous vor'ces 
which make the silence of the great woods, once 
overflowing with affluent melodies, the more ap- 
parent. These light-voiced singers sing their little 
songs, not for the wide skies and the great stars and 
the silent day perfumed with hidden flowers, but 
for the ears of men. One has but to leave the outer 
edges of the woodland to forget these feeble cries ; 
one has but to seek the heart of the ancient forest 



76 MY STUDY FIRE. 

to hear once more those magical notes which seem 
to rise out of the hidden world about him and to 
carry from its heart some secret to his own. The 
voices are still there ; and, better than all, the sub- 
lime mysteries which charge those voices with thrill- 
ing music are there also. 

Nature is still what she has been to all the great 
poets from yEschylus to Emerson, although the 
critics announce the final disappearance of the 
"pathetic fallacy" which underlies Wordsworth's 
verse. Poor critics ! their offense lies not in their 
failure to see, but in their denial that Wordsworth 
saw. Their own defect of vision makes them 
certain that there is no true sight among men. But 
those who see are not concerned with such denials; 
for them the sky is blue, though an army of blind 
men swear it black ; and to those who hear, life is 
still thrilled with mysterious voices though the deaf 
proclaim an eternal silence. Among so many 
doubters and skeptics it is pleasant to hear still the 
unbroken testimony of the older poets to the truths 
that were clear to them when life and youth were 
one. In his latest verse Browning strikes the old 
chords with a virile touch which evokes no uncer- 
tain sound. He pictures the Fates couched dragon- 
wise in the heart of night, casting over the upper 
world a darkness as impenetrable as that in which 
they measure and cut the threads of existence, and 
summing up life in words that seem, save for their 
vigor, borrowed from some of our minor singers : 



A TEXT FROM SIDNEY. 77 

" What's in fancy? Ignorance, idleness, mischief : 
Youth ripens to arrogance, foolishness, greed : 
Age — impotence, churlishness, rancor." 

Into this chamber of blackness descends Apollo, and 
straightway a supernal light breaks on the three 
terrible sisters, which they cannot dim by a torrent 
of fateful words. The shining God thrusts heaven 
upon them : 

" Regard how your cavern from crag-tip to base 

Frowns sheer, height and depth adamantine, one death ! 
I rouse with a beam the whole rampart, displace 

No splinter — yet see how my flambeau, beneath 
And above, bids this gem wink, that crystal unsheathe." 

This is the divine office of that Imagination of 
which Apollo will always remain the noblest symbol 
and the most significant creation. The fancy, deli- 
cate it may be as the flush on a rose or the sculp- 
tured line on a Grecian urn, can never take the 
place of that highest reason by which alone the ulti- 
mate truths are reached and the secrets of life re- 
vealed. The "idle singer of an empty day," the 
doubting, hesitant singer, uncertain of his song, can 
never touch the heart of humanity, nor make it one 
with the world about it. The true poet is still the 
interpreter of the gods. "Thou true land-lord! 
sea-lord ! air-lord ! Wherever snow falls or water 
flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in 
twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds 
or sown with stars, wherever are forms with tran- 



7 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

sparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celes- 
tial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love — 
there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, 
and though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou 
shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or 
ignoble." 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE ARTIST TALKS. 

Last night we sat late over the fire. It had been 
a blustering day, but at sunset the wind fell and the 
stars came out in splendid brilliancy. Rosalind had 
taken up her work, and we were anticipating a long, 
quiet evening, when the door opened and our friend 
the artist walked abruptly in. Without ceremony, 
he dropped his hat and coat on a chair, and almost 
before we realized that he was in the house he was 
standing before the fire warming his hands and saying 
that it was an uncommonly sharp night. No more 
welcome guest ever comes under our roof than the 
artist. Slender, alert, restless, speaking always the 
thought that is uppermost in his mind without refer- 
ence to persons or places, I do not know a more 
genuine, keensighted, and aspiring human soul. I 
looked at him for a moment almost with curiosity ; 
so rare is the sight of a man working out his life 
with eager joy and in entire unconsciousness of him- 
self. His fellow-craftsmen are all talking about his 
extraordinary work, and the world is fast finding 
him out ; but he remains as simple-hearted as a 
child. It is this quality quite as much as the genius 
for expression which I find in him which assures me 
that he has the elements of greatness. When he 
begins to talk, we are always glad to remain silent ; 
79 



80 MY STUDY FIRE. 

such speech as his is rare. A fresher, clearer, more 
original talker never comes into the Study; his 
thought flashes to the very heart of the theme, and 
we see it instantly in some fresh and striking aspect or 
relation. He is so far removed from the atmosphere 
of the materialistic spirit that he is as untouched 
and untainted by it as if it did not exist. Life 
grows rich under his speech; becomes splendid with 
interior truth and beauty; becomes marvelously 
suggestive and inspiring. The commercial stand- 
point and standards do not enter into his conception 
of life and the world; the conventional estimates and 
judgments do not lay a feather's weight on his alert, 
aspiring spirit. The other day I met him coming 
away from a rehearsal at which a famous pianist 
had so thrilled a great audience that the applause 
more than once broke in on the music. "That man 
is an artist," said my friend; "did you notice how 
the crowd irritated him? He hated us because we 
made him conscious of our presence." 

It happened that yesterday Rosalind and I had 
been looking at an etching of Meryon's, and we had 
naturally fallen to talking about the pathos of his 
life ; a man of exquisite genius, every touch of whose 
hand is now precious, but who lived without recog- 
nition and died without hope. And as I had seen 
recently some account of the enormous aggregate 
value of Corot's works, I recalled also the long years 
of indifference and neglect through which the great 
artist waited and worked before fame entered his 



THE ARTIST TALKS. »l 

atelier. When we were comfortably disposed before 
the fire, and the talk, breaking free from personal 
incident, began to flow in its accustomed channels, 
both Meryon and Corot were mentioned by Rosa- 
lind as illustrations of the struggle with the world 
to which some of the greatest souls are subjected ; 
and she added that it was hard to reconcile one's 
self to the swift success which often comes to lesser 
men while their superiors are fighting the battle with 
want and neglect. 

"Don't bother about that," said our friend, start- 
ing out of his chair and standing before the fire. 
"There is nothing that a real artist cares less for 
than what you call success. It is generally a mis- 
fortune if he gets it early, and if it comes to him 
late he is indifferent to it. It is a misfortune when 
a man really wants bread and butter and can't get 
it ; when a man is so straitened that he cannot work 
in peace; but that does not often happen. Most 
men earn enough to fill their mouths and cover their 
backs ; if they earn more, it generally means that 
they are throwing away their chances ; that the devil 
of popularity has got their ear and is buying them 
piecemeal. Neglect and indifference are things 
which a man ought to pray for, not things to be 
shunned while one lives and lamented after one is 
dead. Neglect and indifference mean freedom from 
temptation, long, quiet days in one's studio, hard 
work, sound sleep, and healthy growth. It was a 
great piece of luck for Corot that the world was so 
6 



82 MY STUDY FIRE. 

long in finding him; that it left him so many years 
in peace to do his work and let his soul out. His 
contempt for popularity was well expressed in the 
phrase, 'Men are like flies; if one alights on a dish, 
others will follow.' No happier man ever lived 
than Corot during those years when there was noth- 
ing to do but sit in the fields, pipe in mouth, and 
watch the morning sky, and then go and paint it. 
As for Meryon, his case was a hard one ; but there 
was madness in his blood, and, after all, he had the 
supreme satisfaction of saying his say. He put him- 
self on his plates, and that was enough for any man. 
"People are so stupid about this matter of suc- 
cess," he continued, walking up and down the 
room. "They seem to think a man is miserable 
unless they crowd his studio. For my part, I don't 
want them there. Don't you understand that all 
an artist asks is a chance to work? What we want 
is not success, but the chance to get ourselves on to 
canvas. I paint because I can't help it ; I am tor- 
tured with thirst for expression. Give me expres- 
sion, and I am happy ; deny it, and I am miserable. ' ' 
Here a copy of Keats caught his eye. "It is the 
same with all of us; there was never a greater mis- 
take than the idea that Keats was unhappy because 
critics fell foul of him and the people didn't read 
him. It is natural to wish that people would see 
things as we see them, but the chief thing is that 
we see them ourselves. Keats didn't write for the 
crowd; he wrote for himself. There was a pain 



THE ARTIST TALKS. 83 

in his soul that could only be eased by writing. 
When a man writes an 'Ode to a Grecian Urn,' 
he doesn't need to be told that he is successful. 
They talk about Shakespeare's indifference to fame 
as if it were the sign of a small nature which could 
not recognize its own greatness. Can't they see 
that Shakespeare wrote to free his own mind and 
heart? that before he wrote either play he had con- 
quered in himself the weakness of Hamlet on the 
one hand, and the weakness of Romeo on the other? 
Never was a man more fortunate than Shakespeare, 
for he wrote himself entirely out; he completely 
expressed himself. I can imagine him turning his 
back on London and settling down to his small con- 
cerns at Stratford with supreme content. What 
can the world give to or take from the man who 
has lived his life and put the whole of it into art? 
I understand that everybody is reading Browning 
nowadays; I am surprised they waited so long. I 
discovered him long ago, and have fed on him ever 
since, because I felt the eager longing for life and 
the quenchless thirst for expression in him. No 
English poet has said such true things about art, 
because no one else has understood so thoroughly 
an artist's hunger and thirst, and the things that 
give him peace." Just at this point, when I was 
getting into a talking mood myself, our friend 
stopped suddenly, declared that he had forgotten 
an engagement, seized his hat and coat, and made 
off after his customary abrupt fashion. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE. 

I have often pictured to myself the scene in the 
old Tower when Raleigh broke the spell of prison 
life by writing the history of the world. The rest- 
less prisoner, a born leader and man of affairs, 
whose ambitious projects were spread over two conti- 
nents, was suddenly secluded from the life of his 
time at the hour when that life had for every daring 
spirit an irresistible attraction. On the instant this 
audacious courtier of fortune, ready to take advan- 
tage of any wind and strike for any prize, was locked 
and bolted in the solitude of a cell! Such a man 
must find vent for his arrested energies, or prey upon 
himself. If Raleigh could not go to the world, the 
world must come to him! And it came, -not to 
scorn and triumph over him, but to submit to the 
calm scrutiny of his active mind. There have been 
more striking examples of the victory of a soul over 
its surroundings; Epictetus made himself free 
though a slave, and Marcus Aurelius learned how 
to serve though an emperor; but there has been 
no more dramatic illustration of the victorious asser- 
tion of personality. 

The limitations of most lives are by no means so 
84 



ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE. ?5 

tangible as the walls within which Raleigh was con- 
fined, but there is a certain amount of restriction 
laid on us all. We are all prisoners in some sense; 
the great man who, of all others, demonstrated most 
sublimely the superiority of the soul over all exter- 
nal conditions, described himself as "a prisoner of 
hope." There are fixed limits to the activity of 
even the freest life ; and for many, a narrow field 
is set both for happiness and for work. There is 
one place, however, where no boundaries are fixed, 
no doors closed, no bolts shot: among his books a 
man laughs at his bonds and finds an open road out 
of every form of imprisonment. Last night Rosa- 
lind read to me, from Silvio Pellico's Memoirs, pic- 
tures of his prison life. His very bondage had fur- 
nished material for his pen ; out of the barrenness 
of his prisons he had gathered a harvest of experi- 
ence and thought. There is no kind of bondage 
which life lays upon us that may not yield both 
sweetness and strength, and nothing reveals a man's 
character more fully than the spirit in which he 
bears his limitations. 

It is an easy matter for the man of many burdens 
and of sharp restrictions of duty and opportunity to 
become envious, to rail at fate, and to decry the 
fortune and work of those who are better circum- 
stanced. It is very easy for such a man to shut his 
mind and heart within the same walls which confine 
his body, and to become narrow, hard, and unsym- 
pathetic. There are hosts of men who impose their 



86 MY STUDY FIRE. 

own limitations on the world and set up their own 
narrowness as the standard of virtue ; who identify 
their own small conceptions of time and eternity 
with a divine revelation of truth and pronounce all 
who differ from them anathema. There are few 
spectacles more common or more pitiful than these 
strange illusions by which men mistake their little- 
ness for greatness and the narrow boundaries of 
their own thoughts and feelings for the outermost 
bounds and sheer edge of the universe. To be in 
prison and not be conscious of the bondage is surely 
a tragic comment on one's ideal of freedom. 

We are all shut up within intangible walls of 
ignorance, prejudice, half-knowledge; and the dif- 
erence between men is not the difference between 
those who are in bonds and those who are free, but 
between those who feel their bondage and are striv- 
ing for freedom, and those who, being bound, think 
themselves loose. The long story of the struggles 
and agonies and achievements of men is the story 
of the unbroken effort for freedom; it is the record 
of countless attempts to break jail and live under 
God's clear heavens. Hegel declared that the great 
fact of history is the struggle for freedom, and 
Matthew Arnold reaffirmed the same thing when he 
said again and again that the instinct for expansion 
is at the bottom of the movement of civilization. It 
is this heroic endeavor, often futile, often defeated, 
but never abandoned, which gives history its dignity 
and its thrilling interest. 



ESCAPING FROM BONDAGE. 87 

Of the spiritual and intellectual struggles toward 
light and freedom literature gives the fullest and 
most authentic account. Great writers have always 
been in advance of their time, and the impulse to- 
ward expression has come largely from the inspira- 
tion of escape from some bondage in which other 
men are held. From Socrates to Browning, the 
thinkers and poets have all been emancipators. In 
.the end this bringing of new light into the mind of 
the world will be counted their chief service. 
"When I am dead," said one of the keenest of 
modern minds, one of the greatest of modern 
poets, "lay a sword on my coffin, for I was a sol- 
dier in the war for the liberation of humanity." 
Like service has been rendered by almost all the 
great writers. They have seen beyond their time ; 
they have parted company with some usage, some 
tradition out of which the life had ebbed ; they 
have broken away from some decaying creed; they 
have put some new knowledge in the place of some 
old ignorance. The steady movement of great 
literature is toward the light; and there are few 
instrumentalities so potent to destroy provincialism, 
to dissipate popular misconceptions, and to substi- 
tute for parochial standards and ideas the larger 
thought of the larger world of open-minded men. 
Literature is the hereditary enemy of half-truths, of 
false perspectives in looking at life, of partial esti- 
mates in dealing with men. No man can open his 
mind to the spirit and teaching of the greatest minds 



88 MY STUDY FIRE. 

without suffering an enlargement of vision. A man 
can remain small in a library only by refusing the 
noble fellowship which lies within his reach; he 
cannot have companionship with inspiring per- 
sons and escape some share in their nobler vision 
of life. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 

The study door is rarely closed. For the most 
part, it stands open to those vague and wandering 
sounds which rather serve to convey a sense of com- 
panionship than to interrupt thought and dissipate 
interest. The deepest studies sometimes miss their 
best results because they are too solitary. The 
scholar must keep out of the bustle of active life ; 
but if he cross the line of sympathy, if he lose touch 
with his day and his fellows, there is an end of his 
usefulness. Nothing interprets a great book or a 
great picture like human life ; it is the only com- 
mentary on the growth of art which is worth study- 
ing, for in it alone are to be found the secrets and 
the meaning of art. The scholar must always be 
in the best sense a man of the world : one by whom 
the faces and souls of men are daily read with the 
insight of sympathy ; one to whom the great move- 
ment of humanity is the supreme fact to be felt, to 
be studied, to be interpreted. It is this vital rela- 
tion to his own age which distinguishes the scholar 
from the pedant — the man to whom the heart of 
knowledge reveals itself from the man whose fellow- 



9° MY STUDY FIRE. 

ship with the past is always only "dust to dust, 
ashes to ashes." 

It was just this vitality, this living relation to 
living things, which separated the first great modern 
scholar from the generations of forgotten Dry-as- 
Dusts who preceded him. Petrarch really escaped 
from a sepulcher when he stepped out of the cloister 
of medievalism, with its crucifix, its pictures of un- 
healthy saints, its cords of self-flagellation, and 
found the heavens clear, beautiful, and well worth 
living under, and the world full of good things 
which one might desire and yet not be given over to 
evil. He ventured to look at life for himself, and 
he found it full of wonderful power and dignity. 
He opened his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs 
which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful 
lines, and met the old poet as one man meets 
another; and, lo ! there rose before him a new, un- 
trodden, and wholly human world, free from priest- 
craft and pedantry, near to nature, and unspeakably 
alluring and satisfying. Digging down through a 
vast overgrowth of superstition and pedantry, Pe- 
trarch found the real soil of life once more, and 
found that antiquity had its roots there quite as 
much as medievalism ; that the Greeks and Rom- 
ans were flesh and blood quite as truly as the image- 
worshiping Italians. Then came the inevitable 
thought that these men were not outcasts from the 
grace and care of heaven, "dead and damned 
heathen," whose civilization had been a mere worth- 



SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 91 

less husk to protect the later Christian society, but 
that they belonged in the divinely appointed order 
of history, had lived their lives and done their work 
and gone to their rest as the later generations were 
doing. The moment Petrarch understood these 
very simple but then very radical truths his whole 
attitude toward the past was changed ; it was no 
longer a forbidden country, but a fresh, untrodden 
world, rich in all manner of noble activities and ex- 
periences, full of character, significance, divinity. 
There is no need to recall the mighty stirrings of 
soul that followed ; in Humanism the mind had 
come into fresh contact with life and received a new 
and overmastering impulse. The new learning ran 
like fire over Italy ; old men forsook their vices for 
the charms of scholarship, young men exchanged 
their pleasures for the garb and habits of the student; 
the air was charged with the electricity of new 
thought, and all minds turned to the future with a 
prophetic sense of the great new age on whose 
threshold they stood. 

It was inevitable that in the course of time Hu- 
manism itself should become pedantic and formal, 
should lose its hold upon the turbulent and restless 
life about it, and should finally give place to a later 
and still more vital scholarship. Nothing pauses in 
the sublime evolution of history ; there is no place of 
rest in that pilgrimage which is an eternal truth seek- 
ing. It would be interesting to trace the inner 
history of the learning which Petrarch and Boccac- 



92 MY STUDY FIRE. 

cio and the men of the great Italian Revival carried 
through Europe, and to meet here and there some 
large-minded, noble-hearted scholar, standing book 
in hand, but always with the windows of his chamber 
open to the fields and woods, always with the doors 
of his life open to human need and fellowship. For 
true scholarship never dies; the fire sometimes 
passes from one to another in the hollow of a reed, 
as in the earliest time, but it never goes out. I con- 
fess that I can never read quite unmoved the story of 
the Brethern of the Common Life, those humble- 
minded, patient teachers and thinkers whose devo- 
tion and fire of soul for a century and a half made 
the choice treasures of Italian palaces and convents 
and universities a common possession along the low- 
lying shores of the Netherlands. The asceticism 
of this noble brotherhood was no morbid and divi- 
sive fanaticism ; it was a denial of themselves that 
they might have the more to give. The visions 
which touched at times the bare walls of their cells 
with supernal beauty only made them the more 
eager to share their heaven of privilege with the 
sorely burdened world without. Surely Virgil and 
Horace and the other masters of classic form were 
never more honored than when these noble-minded 
lovers of learning and of their kind made their sound- 
ing lines familiar in peasant homes. Among the 
great folios of the fifteenth century, the very titles 
of which the modern scholar no longer burdens his 
memory with, there is one little volume which the 



SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 93 

world has known by heart these four hundred years 
and more. Its bulk is so small that one may carry 
it in his pocket, but its depth of feeling is so great 
that one never gets quite to the bottom of it, and 
its outlook is so sublime that one never sees quite 
to the end of it. The great folios are monuments 
of patience and imperfect information ; this little 
volume is instinct with human life; a soul speaks 
to souls in it. It was by no caprice of nature that 
the "De Imitatione Christi" was written by a mem- 
ber of the Brotherhood of the Common Life. And 
when the great hour of deliverance from priestcraft 
for Germany and Northern Europe came, it was no 
accident that made another member of the same 
order the fellow-worker with Luther for liberty of 
thought. Erasmus was no reformer, but he was a 
true scholar, and in the splendor of his great attain- 
ments and the importance of his great service the 
obscure virtues of the Brotherhood of the Common 
Life receive a final and perpetual illumination. 

In Kaulbach's striking cartoon of the Reforma- 
tion there is one figure which no one overlooks, 
although Shakespeare and Michael Angelo stand in 
full view. Among the masters of art and literature 
the cobbler, with his leather apron, finds a place by 
right of possession which no one of his compeers 
would dispute. The six thousand compositions of 
Hans Sachs are for the most part forgotten, with 
the innumerable poems of the Minnesingers and 
Meistersingers, but there remain a few verses which 



94 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the world will not care to forget. In spite of the 
roughness of his verse, its unmelodious movement, 
its lack of musical cadence and accent, the cobbler 
of Niirnberg lived in the life of his time ; he had 
eyes that looked upon the skies and fields, and a 
heart that was one with the hearts of his people. It 
was this vital perception that saved him from slavery 
to the mechanism of verse and made him a poet in 
spite of his time and himself. A genuine scholar, 
and yet a man of the people, Hans Sachs lifts him- 
self out of the mechanical pedantry of his age by 
the freshness of his contact with life. He might 
truly have said of himself, as he has said of another : 

" But he — I say with sorrow — 
Is a wretched singer thorough, 
Who all his songs must borrow 
From what was sung before." 

No man can live in a "Palace of Art" without 
danger of missing, not only his own highest develop- 
ment, but that heritage of truth which is always a 
common and never a personal possession. The 
poet who separates himself from his fellows repro- 
duces himself by a law which holds him powerless 
in its grasp ; the poet who lives richly and deeply 
with his kind learns the secrets of all hearts, and, 
like Shakespeare, sees the endless procession of 
humanity passing as he looks into his own soul. 
The scholar masters the letter and misses the spirit 
as he sits in unbroken seclusion among his books ; 
the light of common love and joy and sorrow which 



SOME OLD SCHOLARS. 95 

alone penetrates knowledge to its heart and suffuses 
bare statement with the soul of truth fades from the 
page utterly. And so the study door stands open, 
and intermingling with the great thoughts of the 
past there comes the sound of voices that break the 
solitude of life with hope and faith and love, and 
the rush of little feet that transform it with that 
thought of eternal youth which is only another word 
for immortality. 



CHAPTER XV. 

DULL DAYS. 

It is a day of mist and rain ; a day without light or 
color. The leaden sky rests heavily, almost oppres- 
sively, on the earth ; the monotonous dropping of 
the rain sets the gray dreariness of the day to a 
slow, unvarying rhythm. On such a day nature 
seems wrapped in an inaccessible mood, and one 
gets no help from her. On such a day it not unfre- 
quently happens that one's spirits take on the color 
of the world, and not a flower blooms, not a bird 
sings, in the garden of the imagination. If one 
yields to the mood, he puts on the hair shirt of the 
penitent, and spends the long hours in recalling his 
sins and calculating the sum total of his mistakes. 
If one is candid and sensitive, the hours as they pass 
steadily add to the balance on the debit side of the 
account, and long ere the night comes bankruptcy 
has been reached and accepted as a just award of an 
ill-spent life. Everybody who has any imagination, 
and suffers lapses from a good 'physical condition, 
knows these gray days and dreads them as visitors 
who enter without the formality of knocking, and 
who linger long after the slender welcome which gave 
them unwilling recognition has been worn thread- 
Q 6 



DULL DAYS. 97 

bare. One cannot wholly get away from the weather 
even if his mind be of the sanest and his body of 
the soundest ; we are too much involved in the 
general order of things not to be more or less sym- 
pathetic with the atmosphere and sky. There are 
days when one must make a strenuous effort to be 
less than gay ; there are days when one must make 
an equally strenuous effort to preserve the bare 
appearance of cheerfulness. 

And yet no man need be the slave of the day ; he 
may escape out of it into the broad spaces of the 
years, into the vastness of the centuries. There is 
every kind of weather in books, and on such a day 
as this one has but to make his choice of climate, 
season, and sky. Stirring the fire until it throws a 
ruddy glow on the windows where the melancholy 
day weeps in monotonous despair, I may open The- 
ocritus, and what to me are the fogs and mists of 
March on the Atlantic coast? I am in Sicily, and 
the olive and pine are green, sky and sea meet in a 
line so blue that I know not whether it be water or 
atmosphere; the cicada whirs; the birds stir in the 
little wood; and from the distance come the notes 
of the shepherd's pipe. All this is mine if I choose 
to stretch out my hand and open a little book — all 
this and a hundred other shining skies north and 
south, east and west. I need not spend a minute 
with this March day if I choose to open any one of 
these countless doors of escape. I know the roads 
well, for I have often taken them when such mists as 
7 



9 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

these that lie upon the woods and meadows have 
pressed too closely on my spirits. 

But there is something to be learned from a dull 
day, and the wiser part is to stay and con the lesson. 
He who knows only brilliant skies has still to know 
some of the profoundest aspects behind which nature 
conceals herself. Corot's morning skies stir the 
imagination to its very depths ; but so also do those 
noble etchings of Van Gravesande which report 
the blackness of night and storm about the light- 
house and the somber mystery of the deep woods. 

A dull day need not be a depressing day ; depres- 
sion always implies physical or moral weakness, and 
is, therefore, never to be tolerated so long as one 
can struggle against it. But a dull day — a day with- 
out deep emotions, inspiring thought, marked 
events; a day monotonous and colorless; a day 
which proclaims itself neutral among all the con- 
flicting interests of life, is a day to be valued. Such 
a day is recuperative, sedative, reposeful. It gives 
emotion opportunity to accumulate volume and 
force, thought time to clarify and review its con- 
clusions, the senses that inaction which freshens 
them for clearer perceptions and keener enjoy- 
ments. A dull day is often the mother of many 
bright days. It is easy to surrender one's self to 
the better mood of such a day; to accept its repose 
and reject its gloom. As the hours pass one finds 
himself gently released from the tension of the work 
which had begun to haunt his dreams, quietly 



DULL DAYS. 99 

detached from places and persons associated with 
the discipline and responsibility of daily occupation. 
The steady dropping of the rain soothes and calms 
the restlessness of a mind grown too fixed upon its 
daily task; the low-lying mists aid the illusion that 
the world beyond is a dream, and that the only 
reality is here within these cheerful walls. After 
a time this passive enjoyment becomes active, this 
negative pleasure takes on a positive form. There is 
something pleasant in the beat of the storm, some- 
thing agreeable in the colorless landscape. One 
has gotten rid of his every-day self, and gotten into 
the mood of a day which discountenances great 
enterprises and sustained endeavors of every kind. 
One stirs the fire with infinite satisfaction, and 
coddles himself in the cozy contrast between the 
cheerfulness within and the gloom without. One 
wanders from window to window, lounges in every 
easy chair, gives himself up to dreams which come 
and go without order or coherence, as if the mind 
had given itself up to play. Pleasant places and 
faces reappear from a past into which they had been 
somewhat rudely pressed by a present too busy to 
concern itself with memories ; old plans reform 
themselves, old purposes and hopes are revived; 
the works one meant to accomplish and abandoned 
by the way disclose new possibilities of realization. 
When the afternoon begins to darken, one finds 
that he has gathered from the past many fragments 
that promise to find completion in some new and 



ioo MY STUDY FIRE. 

sounder form. It has been a day of gleaning, if not 
of harvesting. As the night descends, fresh fuel 
renews the smoldering flame, and the past, so quietly, 
almost unconsciously, recalled, projects itself into 
the future, and stirs the imagination with a hope 
that to-morrow may become a purpose, and the day 
after an achievement. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. 

All day long the snow has been whirling over 
the fields in shapes so varied and so elusive that I 
have fancied myself present at a dance of phan- 
toms — wandering ghosts of dead seasons haunting 
the fields which once spread out sunlighted and 
fragrant before them. At intervals the sun has 
pierced the clouds and touched the earth with a 
dazzling brilliancy, but for the most part the winds 
have driven the storm before them, and at times 
wrapped all visible things in a white mist of obscurity. 
On such a day the open fire lights the open book 
with a glow of peculiar cheer and friendliness; it 
seems to search out whatever of human warmth lies 
at the root of a man's thought, and to kindle it with 
a kindred heat. On such a day the companionable 
quality of a book discovers itself as at no other 
time; it seems to take advantage of the absence of 
nature to exert its own peculiar charm. In summer 
the vast and inexhaustible life of nature, audible at 
every hour and present at every turn of thought, 
makes most books pallid and meager. In the uni- 
versal light which streams over the earth all lights 
of man's making seem artificial, unreal, and out of 



102 MY STUDY FIRE. 

place. There are days in summer when the best 
book affects one as a stage set for the play in broad 
daylight. But when the days are shortened, and 
darkness lies on half the dial-plate, the life that is 
in books takes heart again and boldly claims com- 
panionship with the noblest minds. 

As I look out of my window I recognize scarcely 
a feature of last summer's landscape, so universal 
and so illusive is the transformation which the snow 
has wrought. It is a veritable new world which 
stretches away, white, and silent, toward the hori- 
zon. But this change is not greater than that of 
which I am conscious as I look within and follow 
the lines of my books around the walls. These 
wear a new aspect, and one that appeals to me with 
a subtle sense of fellowship. Last summer we were 
casual acquaintances ; to-day we are intimate and 
inseparable friends. It is not only true that there 
is always a man back of a book, but in every book 
there is always a part of one's self. The greater a 
book is, the more familiar it is; we do not stop to 
weigh its affirmations and conclusions ; we have 
always known them to be true. A chapter of scien- 
tific investigation, a page in a book of mere infor- 
mation, will challenge our criticism and arouse our 
antagonism ; but a book of power, a book which 
records the dropping of the lead into some fathom- 
less pool of consciousness, commands our assent at 
once ; it simply expresses what we have always 
known. In summer, nature spreads all manner of 



THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. 1 03 

nets to beguile us out of ourselves; but when the fires 
sing to us, their cheerful monotone becomes a softly 
touched accompaniment to our introspection. The 
golden milestone in the Roman Forum, from which 
one could begin his journey to the four quarters of 
the globe, has its analogue in every man's soul ; into 
whatever part of the universe he would travel, he 
must start from his own personal consciousness. 
Our thoughts make highways of the courses which 
they habitually take when we leave them to them- 
selves, and footpaths along which they loiter when 
fancy beguiles them unawares into her companion- 
ship. But, however the journey be undertaken, or 
to whatever quarter it tend, thought always starts 
from and returns to one's self. It is through our 
own consciousness that we penetrate the secrets of 
other experiences and interpret the mystery of the 
universe. 

There is a sense, therefore, in which all the great 
books are chapters out of our personal history. 
We read them with a certain sense of ownership ; 
the feeling of a man who comes upon a mechanical 
device which he long ago hit upon, but never took 
the trouble to protect by patent. We can never be 
surprised by any revelation of life or character, be- 
cause we carry every possible development of these 
within the invisible realm of our own consciousness. 
Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" fills us with no astonish- 
ment, and the story of the latest hero who died for 
imperiled humanity stirs our pulses mainly because 



104 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the swift crisis appeals to our nobility as it appealed 
to his. How often we chance upon books that 
seem to be literal transcriptions of our own experi- 
ences ! It fills us with a sense of discomfort that 
we should be so well known, that the curtain should 
have been lifted so ruthlessly upon a past which we 
were striving to forget. It is this common con- 
sciousness, this participation in a common memory, 
which keeps us within call of each other in all the 
great crises of life, and makes our libraries places 
of confession and penitence. In the world's cathe- 
dral at Rome there are confessionals to whose im- 
personal sympathy appeals may be made in every 
language spoken by civilized men; but every library 
is a truer confessional, and a more universal, than 
St. Peter's. The dome which overarches every 
collection of great books is nothing less than the 
infinite sky which stretches over the life of man, and 
no human soul ever failed to find there the shrine 
of its own tutelary saint. Literature keeps the 
whole race under constant conviction of sin, and 
there are hours when every man feels like locking 
his study door, so absolutely uncovered and revealed 
does his life lie in the speech of some great book. 

Shakespeare knew us all so well that one feels the 
uselessness of any attempt at concealment in his 
presence; those penetrating eyes make all disguise 
impossible. He takes little account of our mas- 
querade, except to sharpen the edge of his irony by 
a contrast between our pretension and the bare facts 



THE UNIVERSAL BIOGRAPHY. 105 

of our lives. And this revelation of our inner selves 
is the core of every book that endures. It is already 
clear that all the systems of philosophy have had 
their day, and are fast ceasing to be ; and there is 
every prospect that the scholastic systems of theology 
are going the same road. The facts of life — di- 
vine and human — transcend them all, and their 
poverty and inadequacy are more and more appa- 
rent. The universe is too vast for the girdle of 
thought ; it sweeps away immeasurably, and fades 
out of imagination in the splendor of uncounted 
suns. There will be safe paths of knowledge 
through it for men of reverence and humility, but 
the old highway of human omniscience is falling 
into decay. The utmost service of the greatest man 
is to bring us one step nearer to the truth, not as it 
lies clear and absolute in the mind of the Infinite, 
but as it touches, reveals, and sustains this brief and 
troubled life of ours. Therefore it has been that 
the poets have done more for the highest truth than 
the philosophers, unless the philosophers have also 
been poets, as has happened now and then since the 
days of Plato. One turns oftener for inspiration to 
Wordsworth's ode on "Immortality," or to Brown- 
ing's "Death in the Desert" or "Saul," than to 
Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" or Spencer's 
"First Principles." 

When I go into the great libraries I am oppressed, 
not by the mass of volumes packed together under 
a single roof, but by the complexity and vastness of 



106 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the life that lies behind them. Books by the hun- 
dred thousand have been written to give that life 
expression, and yet how little has been said that 
goes to the very heart of existence! When one has 
read the great books in all literatures, how much 
still remains unuttered within him ! 



CHAPTER XVII. 

A SECRET OF GENIUS. 

One of the tests of. greatness is bulk. Mere mass 
never demonstrated the possession of genius, but 
men who have borne the stamp of this rare and 
incommunicable quality have generally been creators 
on a great scale. One may write a single poem 
and give it the touch of immortality ; a line may 
linger as long in the ear of the world as an epic or a 
lyric. But, as a rule, the man who writes one perfect 
verse adds to it many of a kindred beauty, and he 
who paints one great picture covers the walls of the 
gallery. Genius is energy quite as much as insight, 
and whether it dwell in Shakespeare or in Napoleon, 
in Michael Angelo or in Gladstone, it is always the 
mother of mighty works as well as of great thoughts. 
Shakespeare, Goethe, Lope de Vega, Moliere, 
Tennyson, Browning, Hugo, Balzac, Scott, Thack- 
eray, fill great space on the shelves of our libraries 
as well as in our histories of literature. In "Louis 
Lambert" Balzac describes certain forces, when 
they take possession of strong personalities, as 
"rivers of will" ; there is an impetus in these poten- 
tial men which sweeps away all obstacles and rolls 
on with the momentum of a great stream. In men of 
genius the same tireless activity, the same forceful 
habit, are often found; nothing daunts them; noth- 
107 



io8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

ing subdues them ; they make all things tributary 
to self-expression. 

The story of the achievements of Lope de Vega, 
of Scott, of Balzac, has at times a hint of commerce 
with magical powers ; so difficult is it to reconcile 
such marvelous fecundity, such extraordinary crea- 
tive force, with the usual processes of production. 
Nature has fixed definite boundaries to the activity 
of most men ; there is an invisible line beyond which 
they seem powerless to go. Upon the man of 
genius no such limitations are imposed; if he drains 
his soul, it is instantly refilled from some invisible 
fountain. There is something magical about "such 
an achievement as the writing of the "Comedie 
Humaine," with its eighty and more volumes and its 
vast community of characters. The physical feat of 
covering so much paper is no small matter; one 
does not wonder that Balzac retired to his work- 
shop with an unwritten romance in his mind and 
returned with the completed work, worn, exhausted, 
almost emaciated. Such labors cannot be accom- 
plished save by fasting and self-denial. More than 
two thousand personalities live and move and have 
their being in the "Comedie Humaine," and each 
is carefully studied, vividly realized, firmly drawn. 
In no actual community of the same number of 
souls is there anything approaching the distinctness 
of individuality, the variety and force of character, 
to be found in these volumes. Pioneers build 
houses, subdue forests, develop wastes. Balzac did 



A SECRET OF GENIUS. 109 

more ; he fashioned a world and peopled it. All 
passions, appetites, aspirations, despairs, hopes, 
losses, labors, sufferings, achievements, were known 
to him; he had mastered them, and he used them 
as if they were to serve no other purpose than that 
of furnishing material for his hand. To have looked 
into the depths of human life with so wide and 
penetrating a gaze ; to have breathed a soul into 
these abstract qualities; to have clothed them with 
the habits, mauners, characteristics, dress, social 
surroundings, of actual beings; to have lodged 
them in country and city — is there any fairy tale so 
wonderful, any miracle wrought by genie or magi- 
cian so bewildering? Here, surely, are the evidences 
of the flow of one of those rivers of will which have 
more than once transformed society. 

One of the secrets of this marvelous fecundity is to ^ 
keep one's self in the mood and atmosphere in which 
imagination and heart work as one harmonious and 
continuous energy. There is an element of inspira- < 
tion in all great work which is never wholly at com- 
mand; with the greatest as with humbler men, it ebbs 
and flows. There are times when it comes in with the 
rush of the flood; when the mind is suddenly ferti- 
lized with ideas ; when the heart is "a nest of sing- 
ing birds," when the whole visible world shines and 
glows. There are times, also, when its ebb leaves 
mind and heart as bare and vacant as the beach 
from which the tide has receded. These alterna- 
tions of ebb and flow, of darkness and light, are 



no MY STUDY FIRE. 

not unknown to the greatest souls; they are the 
invariable accompaniments of that quality of soul 
which makes a man the interpreter of his fellow and 
of the world which is common ground between them. 
There is something above us whose instruments we 
are ; there are currents of inspiration which touch 
us and our strength is "as the strength of ten"; 
which pass from us and, like Samson shorn, we are 
as pygmies with other pygmies. No man wholly 
commands these affluent moods, these creative 
impulses ; but some men learn the secret of appro- 
priating them, of keeping within their range. These 
are the men who hold themselves with immovable 
purpose to the conditions of their work ; who refuse 
all solicitations, resist all temptations, to compromise 
with customary habits and pleasures ; who keep 
themselves in their own world, and, working or 
waiting, achieve complete self-expression. "I am 
always at work," said a great artist, "and when an 
inspiration comes I am ready to make the most of 
it." Inspiration rarely leaves such a man long 
unvisited. One looks at Turner's pictures with 
wonder in his heart. In this rushing, roaring, sooty 
London, with its leaden skies, its returning clouds 
and obscuring fogs, how were such dreams wooed 
and won? The painter's life answers the question. 
London had small share of Turner; he lived in a 
world of his own making, and the flush of its sky, 
the glory of its golden atmosphere, never wholly 
faded from his vision. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

BOOKS AND THINGS. 

One of the pleasantest features of life is the un- 
conscious faculty which most things possess of 
forming themselves into groups, or allying them- 
selves with each other in the most delightful associa- 
tions. How easy and how agreeable it is to sur- 
round one's self with an atmosphere of congenial 
habits and customs ! One wakes in the morning to 
a day that is no empty house to be explored and 
warmed and made habitable, but which stretches 
pleasantly on like a familiar bit of road, with its 
well-remembered turns and resting-places. It is a 
delightful prelude to the new day to recall, in a 
brief review just before rising, the dear faces of the 
household one is to see again, the sunny rooms to 
which one will shortly descend, the open fire be- 
fore which one will stand while breakfast is being 
laid, the books still open from last night's reading, 
the friendly voices soon to be heard on the street, 
and the accustomed work waiting for one's hand. 
With such pictures in his mind one rises cheerfully 
to meet the toils and demands of another working 
day. The law of association weaves a man's life 
after a time into a rich and varied texture, in which 



H2 MY STUDY FIRE. 

the sober threads of care and work are interwoven 
with the soft hues of love and the splendid dyes 
of imagination; feelings, thoughts, actions, are no 
longer detached and isolated ; they are blended to- 
gether into the fullness and symmetry of a rich life. 
One's toil gathers sweetness from the thought of 
those to whose comfort it ministers ; one's books are 
enriched by the consciousness of the immeasurable 
life from which they flow as tiny rivulets; one's 
friends stand for genius and art and noble achieve- 
ment; and one's life ceases to be a single strain, and 
becomes a harmony of many chords, each suggesting 
and deepening the melody of every other. 

Last evening, after dinner, Rosalind, after her 
usual custom, began playing some simple, beautiful 
German compositions, to which the children never 
fail to respond with a merry frolic. When she came 
to the end of the daily programme, one of the dan- 
cers, golden hair all in disorder, pointed to a page 
in the open music book, and said : "Mamma, please 
play that ; it always makes me think of ' Baby Bell. ' " 
Happy Mr. Aldrich ! Could anything be more de- 
lightful than to know that one's verse is associated 
with music in the mind of a child ! The simple re- 
quest, with its reason, made a deep impression on 
me ; I saw for the first time how early the sense of 
universal beauty is awake in childhood, and how 
instinctively it sees that all beautiful things are akin 
to each other. It was the first page in that sublime 
revelation of the soul of things through which a man 



BOOKS AND THINGS. 113 

comes at last to see in one vision the flower at his 
feet and the evening star silvery and solitary on the 
girdle of the early night, the radiant smile on the 
face that he loves and the great measureless wealth 
of sunshine across the summer fields. It is this 
clear perception of the universal relationship of 
things which makes a man a scholar instead of a 
pedant, and turns a library into a place of inspiration 
and impulse instead of a place of memory and repose. 

In my experience the association between books 
and music is intimate and ever recurring. I never 
hear a certain piece of Haydn's without seeing, on 
the instant, the massive ranges of the Scottish High- 
lands as they rise into the still heavens in the pages 
of Walter Scott's "Waverley" ; and there is another 
simple melody which carries me back to the ship- 
wreck in the "^Eneid." Some books seem to have 
found a more subtle rendering at the hands of 
Chopin ; and there are others which recall move- 
ments in Beethoven's symphonies. For this reason 
it is a great delight to read with a soft accompani- 
ment of music in another room; there always 
remains an echo of melody hidden in the heart of 
thoughts that have come to one under such circum- 
stances, and which gives back its unheard note 
when they are read again elsewhere. In reading 
Milton one rarely forgets that the hand which wrote 
"Paradise Lost" knew the secrets of the organ 
and could turn them into sound at will. 

How many and how rich are the personal associa- 



H4 MY STUDY FIRE. 

tions of books that have gradually been brought 
together as one needed them for his work, and was 
drawn there by some personal longing! This book 
has the author's name written in a characteristic 
hand on the fly-leaf; between the leaves of its 
neighbor is hidden a friendly note from the writer, 
recalling the peculiar circumstances under which it 
was written ; and in this famous novel which lies 
open before me there is a rose which bloomed last 
summer across the sea in the novelist's garden in 
Surrey. In a place by themselves are six little vol- 
umes worn with much reading and with many jour- 
neyings. For many years they were the constant 
companions of one whose hand touched some of the 
deepest chords of life, and made a music of her own 
which the world will not soon forget. They speak 
to me sometimes with the clearness and authority of 
her own words, so many are the traces which she 
has left upon them of intimate fellowship. They 
have been read by the fjords of Norway and the 
lakes of Italy, and I never open them without feel- 
ing the presence of that eager and aspiring spirit to 
whom every day was an open door to a new truth 
and a fresh life. Indeed, I am never so near the 
world as in my study, nor do I ever feel elsewhere the 
burden and mystery of life coming in upon me with 
such awful and subduing power. There are hours 
when these laden shelves seem to me like some vast 
organ upon whose keys an unseen hand evokes the 
full harmony of life. 



BOOKS AND THINGS. 115 

What a magical power of recalling past intellectual 
experiences familiar books possess! — experiences 
that were the beginnings of new epochs in our per- 
sonal history. One may almost recount the growth 
of his mind by the titles of great books ; the first 
reading of Carlyle's essay on "Characteristics," of 
Emerson's "Nature," of Goethe's "Faust," of 
Coleridge's ' 'Literaria Biographica" — how the fresh- 
ness and inspiration of those hours of dawning in- 
sight come back to one as he turns the well-worn 
leaves! It used to be regarded as a rare piece of 
good fortune to have the opportunity of loaning 
books to Coleridge ; the great thinker always re- 
turned them with margins enriched with criticisms 
and comments and references often of far greater 
value than the text itself. A book so annotated, 
with the initials S. T. C. on every other page, became 
thereafter too precious ever to be loaned again. In 
like manner there are written on the margins of the 
books we have about us all manner of personal inci- 
dent and history ; no one reads these invisible rec- 
ords but ourselves, but to us they sometimes out- 
weight the book itself. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

A RARE NATURE. 

Among the multitude of books which find their 
way to the light of my study fire there comes, at 
long intervals, one which searches my own conscious- 
ness to the depths and on the instant compels my 
recognition of that rare creation, a true work of art. 
The indefinable atmosphere, the incommunicable 
touch, of perfection are about and upon it, and one 
is suddenly conscious of a new and everlasting pos- 
session for the race. Such a book lies open before 
me; it is the "Journal Intime" of Henri Frederic 
Amiel. "There is a point of perfection in art," 
says La Bruyere, "as there is of goodness and ripe- 
ness in nature; he who feels and loves it has perfect 
taste; he who feels it not, and who loves something 
beneath or beyond it, has faulty taste." The per- 
fection which I feel in this book is something 
deeper and diviner than taste; it is a matter of 
soul, and must therefore remain undescribed. Like 
the flawless line of beauty, it will instantly reveal 
itself to those who have the instinct for art, and 
to those who fail to perceive it at the first glance it 
will remain forever invisible. There is in some na- 
tures a quality of ripeness which makes all the hard 
116 



I 

4 



A RARE NATURE. 117 

processes of growth sweet and, in the general con- 
fusion of this workshop stage of life, gives us a sud- 
den glimpse of perfection. Not that Amiel was a 
man of symmetrical character or life; in neither of 
these two master lines of action did he achieve any- 
thing like complete success; to himself, as to his 
best friends, rj»e was but a promise, and at his death 
it seemed as if even the promise had failed. Never- 
theless there was in this man of infirm will and im- 
perfect development a quality of soul which must 
be counted rare at all times, and which, in this pres- 
ent era of bustle and energy, brings something of 
the surprise of a revelation with it. These discon- 
nected and unmethodical meditations, extending 
over a period of thirty-three years, are a kind of 
subtle distillation of life in which one feels in its 
finer essence the whole body of modern thinking 
and feeling. This "Journal Intime" is the sole 
fruit of a period of time long enough to contain the 
activities of a whole generation ; but how much 
more significant is the silence of such a book than 
the articulate speech of great masses of men ! It is 
something that, at the bottom of this great restless 
ocean of modern life, such a pearl as this lay hid. 

Amiel stands for a class of men of genius, of 
keenly receptive and intensely sensitive tempera- 
ment; men like Joubert and Maurice de Guerin, 
whose lives are as rich on the side of thought as 
they are unproductive on the side of action. Such 
men teach almost as much through their defects as 



Jl8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

through their strength. Perhaps it is true that the 
quality of ripeness one finds in such natures is due 
to a preponderance of the ideal sufficient to destroy 
the balance of character. Men of this fiber absorb 
experience, and produce only scantily, but their 
production has an unmistakable stamp upon it; 
they are not interpreters of universal life, but they 
slowly distill from life a few truths of luminous qual- 
ity. They recall the profound saying of Alfred de 
Musset, that it takes a great deal of life to make 
a little art; the movement of a generation yields 
them a few meditations, but somehow these seem to 
open everything up and to make us feel how pre- 
cious is thought, since such a vast range of action is 
needed to give it adequate and complete expression. 
After Napoleon has stormed through Europe and 
filled the world with the dust and uproar of change, 
a quiet thinker, living and dying far from the cur- 
rent of events, interprets for us the two or three 
ideas which gave the sword of the soldier its only 
significance and dignity. 

There are a few eternal elements in life, but these 
are hidden for the most part by the dust of traffic 
and travel. Men hurry to and fro in search of 
truth, and are unconscious that it shines over them 
with the luster of a fixed star if they would keep 
silent for a little, and let the air clarify itself, and 
the heavens become visible once more. No life 
gains its perfect poise without action, but in the ex- 
aggerated emphasis laid upon works of hand in this 



A RARE NATURE. 119 

Western world one is often tempted at times by the 
silent solicitation of the meditative East. There, in 
the hush of thought, men have always been con- 
scious of their souls, and, if they have fallen into 
the tideless sea of pantheism, have at least been 
delivered from the hard and dusty ways of material- 
ism. The just balance of life among us is preserved 
by such men as Amiel ; men who keep apart from 
crowds and in the perpetual presence of the ever- 
lasting verities. There is in such men a wonderful 
freshness of thought, which makes us conscious of 
the arid atmosphere in which most of us work and 
suffocate. Life is old only to those who live in its 
conventions and formulas; the soil is exhausted 
only for those whose plowshare turns the shallow 
furrow. To all others it is still fresh with undis- 
covered truth, still inexhaustible in the wealth with 
which the Infinite Mind has stored it, as the Infi- 
nite Hand has filled its veins with gold and its 
mountains with iron. Amiel's life was not one of 
those overflowing rivers which make continents blos- 
som as they sweep to the sea; it was rather one of 
those deep wells which are fed by hidden rills, into 
which a few stars shine with strange luster, and which 
have power to assuage the thirst of the soul. 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 

"If Rosalind were here," I said to myself, as I 
gave the fire a vigorous stirring — "if Rosalind were 
here, the fire would burn with better heart. " Every- 
thing takes advantage of Rosalind's absence; the 
house is less friendly and hospitable, and has become 
at times neglectful of that soothing ministration of 
a home to one's unconscious longings for mute com- 
panionship ; the study has lost something which I 
cannot define, but the going of which has carried 
the charm of the place with it ; even here the fire, 
which has been cheerful in all weathers, and set a 
persistent glow on the front of the sullen days, is 
sluggish and faint-hearted. "Why should I sing 
and shine if there is no face to put a halo about?" 
it seems to mutter to itself as the sticks fall apart 
and the blaze smolders again for the twentieth time. 
It is a still wintry night, and one cannot resist 
the mood which bears him on into the silence and 
solitude of meditation. Without, the lonely stars 
watch the lonely earth across the abysses of space 
which nothing traverses save the invisible feet of 
light. The moon is waning below the horizon which 
shows yet no silvery token of its coming; the earth 



THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 121 

sleeps under the ancient spell of winter. One is 
driven back on himself by a world which, for the 
time, is as mute as if birds had never sung, nor forest 
rustled, nor brooks prattled. One is driven back 
upon himself, and finds the society neither stimula- 
ting nor agreeable. There are times when one is 
excellent company for one's self, but not on such a 
night as this, when the house is deserted, and 
the fire watches for a chance to go out. 

I suspect that the companionship of the open fire 
is, after all, a negative thing ; an accompaniment to 
which one's own mood furnishes the theme that is 
aways elaborated and expanded. If you are cheer- 
ful, your fire sings to you ; if you are overcast, its 
faint and melancholy glow makes the clouds that 
encompass more threatening. It rises or sinks with 
your mood, and its song strikes the major or the 
minor tone according to the pitch of your thought. 
The man who can cheerfully "toast his toes" in 
all weathers will never lack a servile fire to flatter 
his self-satisfaction. Such a man is always housed 
against the storm ; he is never abroad with the tem- 
pests. His little capital of life and love is a buried 
treasure which will not be lost in any venture; it 
feeds no large desire, sustains no noble hope, is 
multiplied into no wealth that may be divided and 
subdivided until it makes the many rich. The 
miserly man is of all men the most unlucky when he 
counts his fortune by the light of the solitary fire. 
It is all there; he touches every shining piece 



122 MY STUDY FIRE. 

and knows that it is safe. But where are those 
greater possessions which yield the priceless revenues 
of love and happiness? They are gained only by 
those who make great ventures ; who invest all their 
hope and joy for the sake of the larger return which 
this inherited wealth, fortunately invested, secures. 
It is a great risk; but what large adventure, what 
splendid achievement, comes unattended with risk? 
He only is perfectly secure from loss who hoards 
his treasure until it corrupts itself for want of use. 
On the other hand, as Lessing has said, he makes 
noble shipwreck who is lost in seeking worlds. It 
is better to go down on the great seas which human 
hearts were made to sail than to rot at the wharves in 
ignoble anchorage. It is far better to put one's whole 
life into some noble venture of love or service than to 
sit at home with slippered feet always on the fender. 
"If Rosalind were here," I said to myself again, 
"this fire would surely need less frequent stirring." 
When I laid the poker down and settled myself for 
further meditation, the blaze suddenly kindled and 
brought the whole room into cheerful relief. In 
the ruddy light my eyes caught the title of a famous 
book whose pages are often open in my hand. It 
was like coming unexpectedly upon a friend when 
one thought one's self alone. I took it from its 
place and let it fall open upon my knee, where the 
dancing light wove arabesques of gold about the text, 
as the monks in the scriptorium once intertwined 
the black letter with the glory of bird and flower. 



THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 123 

It was a wonderful book which lay there open to the 
fire; a book which is "the precious life-blood of a 
master-spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose 
to a life beyond life": a book deep almost as 
thought and great almost as life. I did not read 
the lines that were clearly legible on my knee ; the 
great book seemed to speak its whole message with- 
out words. I recalled the story of the man that 
wrote it; I followed him step by step through his 
stormy and arduous life; I remembered all his losses 
and sacrifices; I understood as never before the 
completeness of his self-surrender. He had been a 
world-seeker; he had missed the lower comforts of 
life; for him the alien stars had burned, but not the 
cheerful fire of unadventurous ease. Had he made 
shipwreck? If he had, his going down had strewn 
the shores of all time with a wreckage so precious 
that it had made the whole world rich. This man 
had put his whole life of happiness into two great 
ventures ; he had risked all for love, and again he 
had risked all for the city that bore him; and his was 
a double loss. Of his splendid fortune of personal 
happiness there remained but a beatific vision and 
a lifelong devotion scorned and rejected. Surely it 
were better to live at ease with one's self and one's 
fire than tempt fortune thus ! But then, I thought, 
are not the man and the book and the vision and 
the great life to be reckoned in the full accounting? 
Out of the bitter root of personal loss and sorrow 
these immortal flowers have bloomed ! 



124 MY STUDY FIRE. 

"If Rosalind were here," I said to the fire, which 
was now burning cheerfully, "she would show us 
the heart of this matter." And as I fell to think- 
ing about her again, I saw how manifold are the 
workings of the law that man must lose his life if he 
would find it, must give himself if he would really 
possess himself. I recalled one by one the books 
that had spoken to me in the crises of my life, or had 
been my companions when the road ran straight and 
sunny before me, and I understood that, one and 
all, these were the returns from great ventures, the 
rewards of great risks. I saw that these great 
spiritual and intellectual treasures had been gotten 
on many shores, plucked from the depths of many 
seas ; that no man is ever rich enough to divide with 
his fellows or bequeath to posterity unless he puts 
his heart into some great affection, and his whole 
thought into some great enterprise. The men who 
sit at home have neither beneficiaries nor heirs; they 
possess nothing but their poverty, and that vanishes 
with them when death makes up the impartial 
account. After all, I said to myself, no one is ever 
poor who has once been rich ; for the real return of 
a great venture is in the expansion and enrichment 
of one's own nature; and that cannot fly from us as 
the shy bird happiness so often escapes into the upper 
sky whence it came to build its fragile nest in our 
hearts. To have done some great service and felt 
the thrill of it, is enough to remember when the 
hour is passed and the deed forgotten ; to have 



THE CUCKOO STRIKES TWELVE. 125 

poured one's whole life into some great affection is 
never to be impoverished again. After the beautiful 
face became first a beautiful memory and then a 
heavenly vision, the poet was never again alone; in 
all his arduous wanderings there was with him one 
whose footfall in Paradise all the world has listened 
to hear. Love is the only synonym in any earthly 
speech for immortality; it has no past, for it carries 
all that it has been in its heart; and it has no future, 
for it already realizes its own completeness and 
finality. To have seen once the heart of a pure, 
loyal, and noble nature is to have gained an imper- 
ishable possession. 

Just then the silence in which I sat was broken ; 
the cuckoo flew out of his little door and chaunted 
twelve cheerful notes. "It makes all the difference 
in the world," I said to myself, "how you report 
the flight of time. You may have a hammer ring 
the hours for you on hard and resonant metal, or you 
may cage a bird and set the years to music." And 
I remembered how long that tiny song had broken 
on my ears ; how it had blended with the first thril- 
ling, articulate cry of life, and how it had kept 
record of hours of great agonies and joys. Through 
the darkness as the light, its cheerful song had set 
the days and years to an impartial music. Did I 
dream then, as I listened, before the dying fire, to 
the echoes of the vanished years, that a bird flew 
out of Paradise, and, alone of all the heavenly brood, 
returned no more, but built its nest along the ways 



126 MY STUDY FIRE. 

of men, seeking always for one to whom its divine 
song should be audible; and that, having heard that 
thrilling note, the chosen ones heard no other sound, 
but followed whithersoever the song led them, and 
knew that at the end it would not die out in the even- 
ing sky! "If Rosalind were here," I said to the 
fire as I covered the warm coals for the night — "if 
Rosalind were here — " 



CHAPTER XXI. 

A GLIMPSE OF SPRING. 

Looking out of the study windows this morning, 
Rosalind noticed a sudden change in the group of 
willows on the hill. There was a tinge of fresh color 
in the mass of twigs which we recognized as the earli- 
est harbinger of spring. In the sky there was a 
momentary softness of tone which turned the dial 
of thought forward on the instant, and we waited 
expectant for the reedy note that should tell us of 
the coming of the birds and the freshness of the 
early summer on the woods and hills. The illusion 
lasts but a moment, for the March winds are rising, 
and the gray clouds will soon overshadow the sky. 
But fancy has been loosened, and will not return to 
its wonted subjection to the work of the day. The 
subject one is studying is flat, stale, and unprofit- 
able; one no sooner settles down to it than the fra- 
grance of the apple blossom, borne from some silent 
field of memory or from some sunny orchard of the 
imagination, turns all the eager search for knowl- 
edge into ashes. When such a mood comes, as 
come it will when prophecies of spring are abroad, 
it is better to yield to the spell than to make a futile 
resistance. 

127 



128 MY STUDY FIRE. 

There is a volume close at hand which fits the day 
and the mood. It is Richard Jefferies's "Field and 
Hedgerow," the last word of one through whose 
heart and hand so much of the ripe loveliness of the 
English summer passed into English speech. One 
has but to open its pages and he finds himself be- 
tween the blossoming hedges waiting for that thrill- 
ing music which lies hidden with the nightingale in 
the copse. T give myself up to the spell of this 
beautiful book, and straightway I am loitering in the 
wheat fields; I cross the old bridge where the once 
busy wheel has grown decrepit and moss-covered 
with age ; I stroll through the deer park, shaded by 
venerable oaks ; I pause at last in the old village 
where the repose and quaintness of an earlier and 
more rustic age still linger. Every flower, every 
grass, every tree, every bird, is known to my com- 
panion ; and he knows, also, every road and by-path. 
Nothing escapes his eye, nothing eludes the record 
of his memory: "Acres of perfume come on the 
wind from the black and white of the bean field ; the 
firs fill the air by the copse with perfume. I know 
nothing to which the wind has not some happy use. 
Is there a grain of dust so small the wind shall not 
find it out? Ground in the mill-wheel of the centu- 
ries, the iron of the distant mountain floats like gossa- 
mer, and is drank up as dew by leaf and living lung. 
A thousand miles of cloud go by from morn till 
night, passing overhead without a sound ; the im- 
mense packs, a mile square, succeed to each other, 



A GLIMPSE OF SPRING. 129 

side by side, laid parallel, book-shape, coming up 
from the horizon and widening as they approach. 
From morn till night the silent footfalls of the pon- 
derous vapors travel overhead, no sound, no creak- 
ing of the wheels and rattling of the chains; it is 
calm at the earth; but the wind labors without an 
effort above, with such ease, with such power. Gray 
smoke hangs on the hillside where the couch-heaps 
are piled, a cumulus of smoke; the wind comes, and 
it draws its length along like the genii from the 
earthen pot; there leaps up a great red flame, shak- 
ing its head; it shines in the bright sunlight; you 
can see it across the valley." 

But, as I read, the moving world about me grows 
vague and indistinct; I find myself thinking more 
and more of my companion. What a glance is his 
which sweeps the horizon and leaves no stir of life 
unnoted ; which follows the bird in its flight and 
detects the instinct which builds its nest and evokes 
its song; which searches the field and records every 
change in the tiny flower of the grass! How spa- 
cious must be the mind, how full the heart, how 
self-centered the life, when one matches with the 
immeasurable beauty of the world the genius which 
searches the heart of it all ! This man surely must 
see his own way clear, must hold his own course 
without doubt or question, must need no help of 
human recognition, while his eye sees with such un- 
erring clearness and his heart beats with the heart 
of nature herself! Was it so with Jefferies? I turn 
9 



13° MY STUDY FIRE. 

from the book and recall the story of his long, heroic 
struggles with poverty, ending at last in a great 
agony of disease and death. Not quite three years 
ago he wrote: "I received letters from New Zea- 
land, from the United States, even from the islands 
of the Pacific, from people who had read my writ- 
ings. It seemed so strange that I should read these 
letters, and yet all the time be writhing in agony." 
"With truth I think I may say that there are few, 
very few, perhaps none, living who have gone 
through such a series of diseases. There are many 
dead — many who have killed themselves for a tenth 
part of the pain; there are few living. " And a 
friend has written of him: "Who can picture the 
torture of these long years to him, denied as he was 
the strength to walk so much as one hundred yards 
in the world he loved so well? What hero like this, 
fighting with Death face to face so long, fearing and 
knowing, alas! too well, that no struggles could 
avail, and, worse than all, that his dear ones would 
be left friendless and penniless? Thus died a man 
whose name will be first, perhaps forever, in his own 
special work." I turn to the last words written by 
his pen three years ago this spring: "I wonder to 
myself how they can all get on without me ; how 
they manage, bird and flower, without me, to keep 
the calendar for them. . . . They go on without 
me, orchis-flower and cowslip. I cannot number 
them all. I hear, as it were, the patter of their feet — 
flower and buds, and the beautiful clouds that, go 



A GLIMPSE OF SPRING. I3 1 

over, with the sweet rush of rain and burst of sun- 
glory among the leafy trees. They go on, and I am 
no more than the least of the empty shells that strew 
the sward of the hill." He has told the heart of 
his story in a sentence: "Three great giants are 
against me: disease, despair, and poverty." 

These terrible words, in which the uttermost 
agony of a human soul speaks, blot out for the mo- 
ment the vision of fair fields and golden weather: 
and one closes the book and falls to thinking. The 
story is an old one ; it has been told of many a great 
heart whose work freights these cases with the weight 
of immortal thought; and it is the consciousness 
that these teachers and singers, these strong, un- 
conquerable spirits, these loyal, aspiring souls, have 
shared with us the common lot of men, have suffered 
and despaired with the great army of humanity, 
which gives their works sustaining power. These 
books, in which we read the story of our own lives, 
were not the work of demi-gods secluded from the 
uncertainty and bitterness of human fortune in some 
serene world of art; our weaknesses, our irresolu- 
tion, our temptations, our blindnesses and misgiv- 
ings, were theirs also. And if they have held to the 
truth of their visions and the reality of their ideals, 
it has not been because they escaped the common 
lot, but because they held their way through it with 
unshaken resolution. Genius does not separate its 
possessors from their fellows ; it makes them the 
more human by its power to uncover the deeps of 



132 MY STUDY FIRE. 

experience, to unlock the innermost chambers of 
the heart, to enter into all that life is and means, 
not only to one's self but to humanity. No human 
soul that comes to full self-knowledge escapes the 
penalty of growth into truth and power: the penalty 
of pain, of doubt and uncertainty, of misconcep- 
tions of spirit and purpose; of bitter struggle to 
make hard facts the helpers in the search and strife 
for freedom and fullness of life ; of long waiting ; 
of the sense of loneliness among one's fellows; of 
the slow achievement through faith and patience. < 

It has been said that the pathos of antique life 
lay in the contrast between the beauty of the world 
and man's few and broken years; and that the 
pathos of medieval life lay in the contrast between 
the same beauty become a manifold temptation, and 
the soul of man, a stranger amid its shows and splen- 
dors, lodged in a cell while the heavens were blue, 
scourged and fasting while birds and wind sang the 
universal song of joy and freedom. The pathos of 
all time and life is the contrast between the illimita- 
ble thirst and the unsatisfying draught, between the 
flying ideal and the lagging real, between the dream 
and the accomplishment, between aspiration and 
capacity and power on the one hand, and change, 
limitation, disease, and death on the other. Litera- 
ture knows this pathos but too well ; the pathos to 
which no great soul and no great life is ever alien. 

The book has long since slipped from my hand, 
and a somber shadow seems to have quenched the 



S 



GLIMPSE OF SPRING. 1 33 

glow of the fire. Out of the window the world lies 
cold and cheerless ; bitter winds are abroad ; the 
leaden sky is hidden by a flurry of snow. Winter 
is supreme everywhere. But the faint color on the 
willows silently speaks of softer skies and golden 
weather ! 



CHAPTER XXII. 

A PRIMEVAL MOOD. 

The early spring days come freighted with strange, 
vague longings ; there is in them some subtle breath 
of the unconfined, universal life-spirit, which fills us 
with a momentary antagonism to all our habits, 
customs, and occupations, and inspires us with a 
desire to be free of all obligations, duties, and respon- 
sibilities. The primitive lawlessness in our blood 
seems to stir dimly with the first movements of life 
under the sod and within the silence of the woods. 
Some long-forgotten existence, antedating all our 
institutions and the very beginnings of society, is 
dimly reflected in the depths of consciousness, and 
makes us restless with desire to repossess ourselves 
of a lost knowledge, to recover a whole epoch of 
primitive experience faded to the vaguest of shadows 
in the memory. 

I am not sure that Rosalind will enter into this 
mood, or that, if she should, she would think it prof- 
itable or healthful. I keep it to myself, therefore; 
feeling quite safe, within the circle of light which 
falls from the shaded lamp about her, from all hea- 
thenish and uncivilized impulses. Indeed, I think 
it would be better if we could feel, amid our intense 
i34 



A PRIMEVAL MOOD. ^35 

activities to-day, a little more of the pulse of the 
free and trustful life which lies like a forgotten page 
at the beginning of the great volume of human his- 
tory. Progress and civilization are normal, health- 
ful, inevitable; it takes very little knowledge and 
thought to detect the fundamental error in Rous- 
seau's theories of the natural state of man, or in the 
occasional play of intellectual willfulness which 
declares for barbarism as more normal and noble 
than civilization. Nevertheless, there are certain 
things which men are likely to lose in the swift move- 
ment of modern life which have always been among 
their best possessions. Freshness of perception, a 
sensitive mental retina, openness to the unobtrusive 
but wonderfully significant procession of star and 
flower and storm-cloud — these are among the pre- 
cious things which men have largely lost by the 
way. The intense retrospection of modern life has 
given us a marvelously rich literature of subjective 
observation and meditation ; but we are in danger 
of missing the freshness, the joy, the poetic impres- 
siveness of the world that lies within the empire of 
the senses. This thought was in Wordsworth's 
mind when he wrote that profound and moving 
sonnet: 

" The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers : 

Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 

This sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; 



I3 6 MY STUDY FIRE. 

The winds that will be howling at all hours 
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers — 

For this, for everything, we are out of tune ; 
It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

The note of revolt in these striking lines is not 
unfamiliar to men and women in whom the poetic 
mood survives and at times asserts itself with the 
momentary tyranny of a king who has forgotten that 
he is dethroned. In every healthful nature there 
must be an outlet into the ancient life of fresh impres- 
sions, of senses still unsubdued to the work of the 
calculating intellect, of impulses still vigorous with 
unspent vitality. It is to satisfy this craving that 
some men find themselves drawn irresistibly at times 
to the Odyssey, with its free, fresh life of move- 
ment and action ; it is because the great race legends 
of the Scandinavian, the German, and the Celt have 
this breath of the morning upon them that they take 
possession of the imagination and stir such vague 
but passionate responses within us. It is to satisfy 
this craving, no doubt, that a young poet now and 
then gives rein to his imagination, and celebrates his 
freedom in verse better suited to Bacchic and other 
lost pagan moods than to modern ears ; and, recall- 
ing the exuberant vitality of such a youth as Goethe's 
before it had learned that obedience is the only road 



A PRIMEVAL MOOD. 137 

to freedom, we are not surprised to hear him say to 
Merck in the early Weimar days : "We are some- 
what mad here, and play the devil's own game." 

While I had been letting my thoughts run in this 
riotous fashion Rosalind had been intently reading 
Maurice de Guerin. Suddenly she looked up from 
the book and read aloud some striking sentences 
from that exquisite piece of poetic interpretation, 
the "Centaur." The old Centaur is telling the 
story of his wonderful early life, with its seclusion, its 
unfettered freedom, its kinship with nature, its near- 
ness to the gods. There is in the story a deep sin- 
cerity, a simplicity, a strange familiarity with the 
secrets and mysteries of nature, which never cease 
to touch me as a kind of new power in literature. 
The Centaur describes his wild, far wanderings 
through the deep valleys and along the mountain 
summits until the evening shadows began to fill the 
recesses of the remoter hills. "But when Night, 
filled with the charm of the gods, overtook me on 
the slopes of the mountain, she guided me to the 
mouth of the caverns, and there tranquilized me as 
she tranquilizes the billows of the sea. Stretched 
across the threshold of my retreat, my flanks hidden 
within the cave, and my head under the open sky, 
I watched the spectacle of the dark. The sea gods, 
it is said, quit during the hours of darkness their 
places under the deep ; they seat themselves on the 
promontories, and their eyes wander over the 
expanse of the waves. Even so I kept watch, hav- 



138 MY STUDY FIRE. 

ing at my feet an expanse of life like the hushed 
sea. My regards had free range, and traveled to the 
most distant points. Like sea beaches which never 
lose their wetness, the line of mountains to the west 
retained the imprint of gleams not perfectly wiped 
out by the shadows. In that quarter still survived, 
in pale clearness, mountain summits naked and pure. 
There I beheld at one time the god Pan descend 
ever solitary; at another, the choir of the mystic 
divinities ; or I saw some mountain nymph charm- 
struck by the night. Sometimes the eagles of Mount 
Olympus traversed the upper sky, and were lost to 
view among the far-off constellations, or in the shade 
of the dreaming forests." 

I cannot describe the eloquence of these words 
as Rosalind read them, with rising color and deepen- 
ing tone ; the eloquence of the imagination narra- 
ting the past, and making its most wondrous forms 
live again. The secret of the Centaur perished 
with him, but not the charm of his life. The 
wild, free range of being, with vision of descending 
deities and spell-bound nymphs ; the fellowship with 
mighty forces that science has never tamed; the 
sway of impulses that rise out of the vast uncon- 
scious life of nature — these still penetrate at times 
our habits and occupations, and find our hearts 
fresh and responsive. It is then that we draw away 
from men for a season, and become one of those of 
whom the same wise Centaur said that they had 
"picked up on the waters or in the woods, and car- 



A PRIMEVAL MOOD. 139 

ried to their lips, some pieces of the reed pipe thrown 
away by the god Pan. From that hour these mor- 
tals, having caught from their relics of the god a 
passion for wild life, or perhaps smitten with some 
secret madness, enter into the wilderness, plunge 
among the forests, follow the course of the streams, 
bury themselves in the heart of the mountains, rest- 
less, and haunted by an unknown purpose." 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 

Rosalind had been so absorbed in reading Mr. 
Lowell's essay on Gray that she had not noted the 
slow sinking of the fire; it was only when she had 
finished that noble piece of criticism and laid aside 
the volume that she became suddenly conscious of 
her lapse of duty, and began to make vigorous repa- 
ration for her oversight. For a moment the flame 
crept cautiously along the edges of the wood; and 
then, taking heart from glowing fellowship, sud- 
denly burst into full blaze and answered the roar- 
ing wind without with its own note of defiance. I 
sat quietly behind my desk, enjoying the various 
charming pictures, framed in mingled light and 
shadow, which Rosalind's struggle with the fire 
seemed to project into the room. I am sure that 
the charm is in her, and that the illusive play of 
imagination, the soft and wandering glow touching 
now a book and now a picture, the genial warmth 
which pervades the place, are really a subtle 
materialization of her qualities. For me at least, 
the fire loses its gentle monotone of consolation 
when her face is not transfigured by it, and I enjoy 
it most when I feel most deeply that it is but a sym- 
bol of that which she has added to my life. 
140 



THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 141 

I was saying that Rosalind had been reading Mr. 
Lowell's essay on Gray. When she had stirred the 
smoldering flame into a blaze, she opened the book 
again and read aloud here and there a luminous 
criticism, or one of those perfect felicities of style 
which thrill one as with a sudden music. When 
she had finished she said, with a half-sigh: "I am 
sure there can be but one pleasure greater than the 
reading of such a piece of work, and that is the 
writing of it. Why does it kindle my imagination 
so powerfully? why does it make everything I have 
read lately seem thin and cold?" 

There is a soft glow on her face as she asks this 
question, which I cannot help thinking is the most 
charming tribute ever paid even to Mr. Lowell, a 
writer fortunate beyond most men of genius in the 
recognition of his contemporaries. The question 
and the face tempt me away from desk and my task, 
and invite me to the easy-chair from whence I have 
so often studied the vagaries of the restless fire. 
Rosalind's question goes to the very heart of the 
greatest of the arts, and has a personal interest be- 
cause she takes as her text one of the best known 
and best loved of the friends whose silent speech 
makes this room eloquent. The second series of 
"Among My Books" lies on the desk at my hand, 
and as I open it at random the eye falls on these 
words from the essay on Dante: "The man behind 
the verse is far greater than the verse itself, and the 
impulse he gives to what is deepest and most sacred 



142 MY STUDY FIRE. 

in us, though we cannot always explain it, is none 
the less real and lasting. Some men always seem to 
remain outside their work ; others make their indi- 
viduality felt in every part of it — their very life 
vibrates in every verse, and we do not wonder that 
it has 'made them lean for many years.' The vir- 
tue that has gone out of them abides in what they 
do. The book such a man makes is indeed, as 
Milton called it, 'the precious life-blood of a mas- 
ter spirit.' Theirs is a true immortality, for it is 
their soul, and not their talent, that survives in their 
work." 

"There," I said, "is the answer to your question 
from the only person who can speak with authority 
on that matter. What you feel in that essay on 
Gray, and what I always feel in reading Lowell, is 
not the skill of a marvelously trained hand, but the 
movement of a large, rich nature to whom life speaks 
through the whole range of experience, and who 
has met that constant inflow of truth with a quiet 
nobleness of mind and heart. Mr. Lowell seems to 
me pre-eminently the man of genius as distinguished 
from the man of talent ; the man, that is, who holds 
heart and mind in close, unconscious fellowship 
with the whole movement of life, as opposed to the 
man who attempts to get at the heart of these things 
by intellectual dexterity. The great mass of writ- 
ing is done by men of talent, and that is the reason 
why this account of Gray makes what you have been 
reading lately seem cold and thin. There is in this 



THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 143 

essay a vein of gold of which Mr. Lowell is perhaps 
unconscious; it is the presence of his own nature 
which gives his piece of criticism that indescrib- 
able quality which every human soul recognizes at 
once as a new revelation of itself. 

"The man of talent is simply a trained hand, a 
dexterity which can be turned at will in any direc- 
tion ; this is the kind of literary faculty which 
abounds just now, and is so sure of itself that it 
denies the very existence of genius. The man of 
genius, on the other hand, is a large, rich nature, 
with an ear open to every whisper of human experi- 
ence, and a heart that interprets the deepest things 
to itself before they have become conscious in the 
thought. The man of genius lives deeply, widely, 
royally; and the best expression he ever gives of 
himself is but a faint echo of the world-melodies 
that fill his soul. When such a man writes, he does 
not draw upon a special fund of information and ob- 
servation ; the universe of truth lies about him, and 
rises like an inexhaustible fountain within him. 
One feels in the work of such a man as Lowell the 
presence, to use Ruskin's phrase, not of a great 
effort, but of a great force. There is no sugges- 
tion of limitation, no hint that one has reached the 
end of his resources ; on the contrary, there is pres- 
ent the indefinable atmosphere of an opulent nature, 
whose wealth is equal to all draughts, and whose 
capital remains unimpaired by the greatest enter- 
prises. Shakespeare was not impoverished by 



144 MY STUDY FIRE. 

'Hamlet,' nor Goethe by 'Faust.' 'To be able to 
set in motion the greatest subjects of thought with- 
out any sense of fatigue,' says Amiel, 'to be greater 
than the world, to play with one's strength — this is 
what makes the well-being of intelligence, the Olym- 
pic festival of thought.' " 

The fire, which had been burning meditatively 
during this discourse, sank at this point into a bed of 
glowing coals, and I took breath long enough to re- 
plenish it with a fresh stick or two. Rosalind mean- 
while had taken up her sewing. 

"Don't you believe, then, in an art of literature 
apart from life?" she asked. 

"To begin with," I answered, "there is no such 
thing as a separation of art from life ; it is modern 
misconception which not only separates them, but 
sets them in contrast. A true art is impossible 
apart from life; the man of genius always restores 
this lost harmony. The man of talent divorces his 
skill from life, the man of genius subordinates his 
training to the truth which speaks through him. 
To him art is not mere skill, but that perfect repro- 
duction of ideal life which the world gains when 
Pheidias gives it the Olympian Zeus, Raphael the 
Sistine Madonna, and Dante the Divine Comedy. 
Mr. Lowell is the greatest of our poets because his 
trained hand moves in such subtle harmony with 
his noble thought. He wears 'all -that weight of 
learning lightly as a flower.' The impulses of a 
man of genius come from life; they are deep, rich, 



THE METHOD OF GENIUS. 145 

vital ; they rise out of the invisible depths of his 
consciousness as the unseen mists rise out of the 
mighty abyss of the sea ; and as the clouds take 
form and become the splendor and the nourishment 
of toiling continents, so do these impulses become 
distinct and articulate, and touch life at last with 
an indescribable beauty and strength. On the other 
hand, the impulses of a man of talent spring from 
skill, knowledge, the desire and profit of the mo- 
ment. The deepest truth is not born of conscious 
striving, but comes in the quiet hour when a noble 
nature gives itself into the keeping of life, to suffer, 
to feel, to think, and to act as it is moved by a wis- 
dom not its own. The product of literary skill is a 
piece of mechanism — something made and dex- 
terously put together in the broad light of the work- 
shop ; the work of genius is always a miracle of 
growth, hidden from all eyes, nourished and ex- 
panded by the invisible forces which sustain the 
universe. ' ' 

At this point I became suddenly conscious that 
my hobby was in full canter, and that Rosalind 
might be the unwilling spectator of a solitary race 
against time. 

"My dear," I said, "your question must bear the 
responsibility of this discourse. There are some 
names so rich in associations with one's intellectual 
life, so suggestive of the best and truest things, that 
they have a kind of a magical power over our minds; 
they are open sesames to about all there is in us." 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 

This afternoon, when Rosalind came in from her 
walk, she brought an indefinable atmosphere of 
spring with her. I was not surprised when she said 
that she had seen a bluebird ; I should hardly have 
been surprised if she had told me the summer was 
at our doors, and the fire must go out that the 
hearth might be swept and garnished. There are 
times when prophecy is swiftly fulfilled by the imagin- 
ation, and turns into history under our very eyes. 
For days past there have been harbingers of change 
on every hand; and fancy, taking the clues so 
magically dropped here and there in field and sky, 
travels with swift flight onward to the songs and 
flowers of June. This evening the season has 
wrought its spell upon us; and while we have listened 
to the winds of March, and watched the shifting 
outlines of the fire, our thoughts have caught some- 
thing of the glow of summer. Rosalind has had 
various house-cleaning plans running through her 
mind, no doubt, but she has kept them to herself. 
I believe in the sharing of cares, but I admire, above 
all things, the loving skill which reserves the com- 
mon problems of the household for some fit hour, 
146 



A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 147 

and keeps the evening intact for sweeter and more 
inspiring fellowship. I sometimes wonder if a good 
many women do not lose that touch of sentiment 
which is the fragrance of domestic life, by keeping 
the machinery too constantly within sight and hear- 
ing; the whir of the wheels must be deadened if 
the fireside is to hear the best talk, and to cast its 
magical glow on the most complete companionship. 
The supreme charm of a woman is her atmosphere; 
and how shall that be serene and sunny, touching 
the life of the home with indefinable color and fra- 
grance, if problems and perplexities are not kept 
well in the background? The women whose pres- 
ence is both rest and inspiration are not as numer- 
ous as they might be if the secret of their charm 
were told abroad. This is a digression, but, in the 
ramble, what moments are so delightful as those 
in which we stray from the road to pluck a wild 
flower, or to find a fairer outlook? 

"I am not sure," said Rosalind, "that I should 
care for perpetual sunshine. One values a beautiful 
thing most when it appeals to a fresh perception of 
its charm. I don't believe I should enjoy summer 
half so much if it were always at hand." 

I was thinking the same thought, but with a dif- 
ferent application. I had just been reading one of 
those perverse writers who are always sure that their 
own age is the worst in all history, and their own 
country the most depraved in the world. If they 
would only add that they themselves were the most 



148 MY STUDY FIRE. 

misleading of writers, I could offset the truth of 
the last statement against the falsehood of the other 
propositions, and feel that something had been 
gained. The particular prophet to whose monody 
I had been giving a few moments of half-hearted 
attention had assured me that we have come to the 
end of poetry and all great work of the imagination, 
and have entered upon a period of final decadence. 
All noble dreams of idealism have faded, and a dull 
gray sky is henceforth to overarch life and leave it 
cold and colorless. This pessimistic note is famil- 
iar to all readers of modern books; they have heard 
it in all keys, and with all the varied modulations of 
literary skill. Renan has sung the swan-song of 
the noble idealism of the past in his limpid and 
beguiling French periods, and English and Ameri- 
can pens have taken up the burden of the refrain 
and set it to a varied and seductive music. The 
swan-song has become to many sensitive spirits a 
veritable siren melody, luring them away from all 
noble effort and action. These thoughts were in 
my mind as I gave the fire an energetic stirring to 
express my deep and growing aversion to the gospel 
of disillusion which is fast substituting for the pro- 
phetic dream of the imagination the nightmare of 
despair. 

"I do not understand," I said, as I sank back 
into my easy-chair, "why men who write books will 
not occasionally look out of the windows of their 
libraries and take note of the bluebirds and the 



A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 149 

gleams of softened sky. We happen just now to 
be in a period of comparative barrenness in poetry. 
We have had within this present century a golden 
summer of marvelous fertility ; one has to go back 
a good many seasons to recall another so prodigal 
of color, so full of all manner of noble fruitage. 
There has followed a softened but beautiful autumn, 
the aftermath of a cloudless day; and now has come 
the inevitable winter of pause, silence, and apparent 
barrenness. Straightway the older men, recalling 
the glorious days of their youth, fall to moaning 
over the final disappearance of summer ; and some 
of the younger men, chilled by the season and unable 
to rekindle the torches that have burnt out, join 
in the tragic chorus, and give themselves to the 
writing of epitaphs of classical perfection of form 
and more than classical coldness of temper. There 
are times when one feels as if most recent poetry 
had been written solely for mortuary purposes. The 
chill of death is on it; one's only consolation in 
reading it springs from the conviction that it is 
written over an empty tomb; and it must be con- 
fessed that grief has a hollow sound, even in verse 
of classical correctness, when one knows that the 
death which it laments with elegiac elegance has not 
actually taken place. For myself, I confess I am 
so weary of the funeral note of recent verse that I 
have gone back to Shakespeare with an almost rapa- 
cious appetite. An evening on Prospero's Island, 
with Ariel hovering in mid-air, the invisible mes- 



15° MY STUDY FIRE. 

senger of that Imagination which his master embod- 
ies, gives me back the old harmonies of hope and 
joy and life. The music of the sea that sings round 
that island is heard by few mariners in these melan- 
choly days. It is significant that the greatest writers 
are never despondent or despairing. Such men as 
Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe were serene 
and joyous in a world whose deeper mysteries were 
far more real and pressing to them than to the minor 
singers of to-day. The trouble is not in the age, 
but in the men. The man who cannot be strong, 
cheerful, creative, in his own age, would find all 
other ages inhospitable and barren." 

Here I saw that Rosalind was about to speak, if 
she could get the opportunity, and I generously 
gave it to her. 

"I quite agree with you," was her agreeable com- 
ment; "but what did you mean by saying at the 
beginning that writers ought to look out of their 
library windows oftener?" 

"I'm glad you reminded me of my text," I 
answered. "The point of what I have been saying 
was in that remark. In the world of thought, 
imagination, and feeling, seed-time and harvest are 
ordained quite as distinctly as in the world of fruits 
and flowers. There are epochs of splendid fertility, 
and there are epochs of sterility. It is by no acci- 
dent that one age is silent and the next flooded with 
melody. The tide of creative impulse ebbs and 
flows under a law which has not been discovered; 



A HINT FROM THE SEASON. 15 1 

but the return of the tide is no less certain than its 
ebb. Why, then, should men of talent wander up 
and down a beach from which the waters have 
receded, wringing their hands and adding a hollow 
moan to the mighty monotone of the sea because 
the tide will return no more? More than once, in 
other and parallel ages, these melancholy cries have 
been drowned by the incoming tides. Life is inex- 
haustible, and he must be blind indeed who does 
not see in the movements of to-day the possibilities 
of a future in which art shall come nearer than ever 
to human hearts, and add to its divine revelation of 
beauty some undiscovered loveliness." 



CHAPTER XXV. 

A BED OF EMBERS. 

There is no event in the household life so mo- 
mentous as the coming of a friend; it is one of the 
events for which the home was built and in which 
its ideal is realized. "The ornament of a house," 
says Emerson, "is the friends who frequent it." 
Their character, culture, aims, reveal the law of its 
being; whether it stands for show, for mere luxury, 
or for large and noble living. "Honor to the house 
where they are simple to the verge of hardship; so 
that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws 
of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, 
honor and courtesy flow into all deeds." How 
easy it is to collect handsome furniture and crowd 
a house to suffocation with things which give one 
no impression of individuality, but only an impres- 
sion of expense ! Elaborate homes abound in these 
days, but for the most part they serve mainly to 
emphasize the vulgarity of the people who inhabit 
them ; an elegant house is a dangerous possession 
for those whose social training has not prepared 
them for it. Such homes are not without their ad- 
vantages to the children who grow up in them, but 
the elders are always out of place in them. The 
152 



A BED OF EMBERS. 153 

real charm of a home is the indefinable atmosphere 
which pervades it, made up of the personalities who 
live in it, of the friends who frequent it, of the pic- 
tures which hang upon its walls, the books which lie 
upon its tables, and all its furnishings which dis- 
close taste, training, and character. Many elegant 
houses impress one with a painful materialism ; even 
when all things are in keeping there is an elabora- 
tion which offends the mind by making too much of 
bodily comfort and mere physical luxury. The 
highest intellectual and social types are not likely 
to be developed in such an atmosphere ; Attic rather 
than Asiatic influences have inspired the finest social 
life. The first and final impression of a house should 
come, not from furniture, but from those material 
things which stand for thought, for beauty, for the 
ideal. I should shrink from creating a home which 
people should remember for its ministration to their 
bodies; that kind of service can be bought at the 
inn ; I should count myself fortunate if my home 
were remembered for some inspiring quality of faith, 
charity, and aspiring intelligence. One cannot 
write about his own home without egotism, for it is 
the best part of himself. If I were to write about 
mine, as I fear I am constantly doing, I should 
simply write about Rosalind. When I think of 
what home is and means, I understand the absolute 
veracity of Lowell's sentiment that "many make 
the household, but only one the home." In every 
home there is one whose nature gives law and 



154 MY STUDY FIRE. 

beauty to its life; who builds it slowly out of her 
heart and soul, adorns it with the outward and visi- 
ble symbols of her own inward and spiritual gifts, 
and makes it her own by ministrations not to be 
weighed and counted, so impalpable, so numberless, 
and so beyond all price are they. But of the friends 
who pull one's latch-string and sit before one's fire 
one may speak without offense and with infinite 
satisfaction to himself; the coming and going of 
those who know and love us best form the most in- 
spiring records in the domestic chronicles. 

Last night the study fire burned late ; or rather 
we sat by it so late that it was only a bed of embers. 
What a glow came from it, and what heat! The 
blaze of the earlier evening yielded nothing so grate- 
ful, so beautiful, so full of appeal to the memory 
and the imagination. We lingered long, and with 
deepening joy and gratitude; we seemed to pause 
for an hour between a past rich in memories and a 
future affluent in hopes. We waited for our friend 
to speak, and every time her voice broke the silence 
it seemed to recall some half-forgotten phase of a 
life set to pure and beautiful ends, some trait of a 
nature full of a sweet strength of mind and heart : 

" A soul serene, Madonna-like, enshrined 
In her dear self." 

The embers glowed with a soft and genial heat 
which seemed to make the exchange of confidences 
between us easy and natural. Even with those who 



A BED OF EMBERS. 155 

stand nearest to us we can never force one of those 
interchanges of thought which mark the very best 
moments of our lives ; they must grow out of the 
occasion and the mood, and they sometimes elude 
our most patient endeavors. In the story of ' 'Faust" 
Goethe undoubtedly meant to say, among other 
things, that a man does not own his soul; he can- 
not barter it for any price, because it belongs to 
God. It is certain that the deeper self which we 
call the soul does not hold itself at our beck and 
call. There are hours when it is inaccessible, 
although we make strenuous effort to reach it; 
when it is dumb, although we urge it to speak. But 
at the moment when we least expect such happiness, 
it suddenly reveals itself to us, and to that other 
whose atmosphere, whose gift or grace or accent, 
has somehow won its confidence and inspired it 
with utterance. There have been moments like this 
in our history which seem to be, as we look back, 
the real events in our lives — those events which have 
made us acquainted with our own natures, and held 
open the door of life at the same time. The glow- 
ing embers sent a warm thrill into our very hearts, 
and in that warmth our thoughts seemed to flow 
together. Then, for the first time, I understood 
the real sentiment of that residuum of fire and heat 
which the flame leaves behind it. The heart of the 
fire survives the perishing of the material which fed 
it; that has vanished, but its soul of heat and light 
remains, a beautiful afterglow. In some kindred 



156 MY STUDY FIRE. 

sense friendship is the survival of the perishable 
element of the years that are gone ; actions, experi- 
ences, words, are mostly forgotten, but the trust, 
faith, affection, that grew out of and through these 
remain to give light and warmth to the later time. 
The past that has burned out, like the flame of 
the earlier evening, survives in these glowing em- 
bers, radiating heat and light. 

As the embers form the residuum of that which 
is gone, so do they make the surest foundation for 
future activity and beauty. I have but to lay a 
few sticks across these coals, and immediately the 
blaze is kindled ; there lies the compressed force of 
fire. There are hearths on which the glow never 
dies; it is kindled and rekindled day after day, until 
it becomes a continuous fire from season's end to 
season's end. Like the ancient hearth-fires from 
which the Greek emigrants carried embers when 
they parted from the overcrowded community, these 
fires light each new day and each succeeding month 
with something from the warmth and glow of the 
day and the month that are gone. Friendship 
carries into the future whatever was best and truest 
in our past relationships ; whatever could be de- 
tached from the perishable forms in which our lives 
express and manifest themselves. Each year adds 
to the accumulations of the past, and levels still 
more those invisible walls which separate us. The 
solitude of life is known to us all ; for the most part 
we are alone, and the voices of friends come only 



A BED OF EMBERS. 157 

faint and broken across the impassable gulfs which 
surround every human soul. No one has felt the 
pathos of this solitude more keenly or given it 
a more deeply poetic expression than Matthew- 
Arnold : 

"Yes ! in the sea of life enisled, 

With echoing straits between us thrown, 
Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 

We mortal millions live alone. 
The islands feel the enclasping flow, 
And then their endless bounds they know. 

"But when the moon their hollows lights, 
And they are swept by balms of spring, 
And in their glens, on stariy nights, 

The nightingales divinely sing ; 
And lovely notes, from shore to shore, 
Across the sounds and channels pour — 

" Oh ! then a longing like despair 

Is to their farthest caverns sent ; 
For surely once, they feel, we were 

Parts of a single continent ! 
Now round us spreads the watery plain — 
Oh, might our marges meet again ! 

"Who order'd that their longing's fire 

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd ? 
Who renders vain their deep desire ? 

A God, a God their severance ruled ! 
And bade betwixt their shores to be 
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea." 

The moods in which the sense of kinship out- 
weighs the sense of isolation, when the balms of 



IS 8 MY STUDY FIRE. 

spring are in the air, and in the solitudes a divine 
music is heard, come oftenest at the bidding of the 
friend who has journeyed with us in the day of 
action, and bivouacked with us when the night of 
sorrow has fallen upon us, swift and awful, from the 
shining skies. There are those who were born to be 
our kinsmen of the soul, and whose voice reaches us 
when all other voices fail, "For the rest, which we 
commonly call friends and friendships," says the 
wise Montaigne, "are nothing but acquaintance, 
and familiarities, either occasionally contracted or 
by some design, by means of which there happens 
some little intercourse betwixt our souls: but in the 
friendship I speak of, they mix and work themselves 
into one piece, with so universal a mixture that there 
is no more sign of the seam by which they were first 
conjoined. If a man should importune me to give 
a reason why I loved him, I find it could no other- 
wise be exprest than by making answer, because it 
was he, because it was I. There is beyond I am 
able to say, I know not what inexplicable and fatal 
power that brought on this union." 

As we say good-night we carefully cover the em- 
bers with ashes, which no longer signify desolation, 
but the husbanding of the fire for to-morrow's cheer 
and warmth. Friendship is always prophetic of the 
morrow; its past is prophecy and promise of the 
morrow. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

A DAY OUT OF DOORS. 

As I sit looking into the study-fire my glance 
rests on a pair of snow-shoes on the broad chimney 
breast, and straightway fancy flies abroad and recalls 
a glorious day of winter cheer and exploit. 

A writer of deep suggestiveness has commented on 
the superior advantages of the man on horseback 
over the man on foot; but this exalted condition, 
which in certain seasons gives one a delicious sense 
of sovereignty, affords neither advantage nor charm 
in the northern climate in midwinter. The man to 
whom all things are possible under these circum- 
stances is the man en snow-shoes. He alone holds 
the key of the snow-beleaguered forests; to him 
alone is intrusted the right of eminent domain — the 
privilege, in other words, of seizing for his own 
use the lands of his neighbors; he alone owns the 
landscape. Great privileges never go save in com- 
pany with grave responsibilities, and not unfre- 
quently with serious perils. No one need expect, 
therefore, to be put into possession of the landscape 
except upon conditions more or less formidable. 
The snow-shoe is a delightful feature of decoration ; 

159 



160 MY STUDY FIRE. 

how often have we seen it effectively displayed 
against a proper background, and straightway, as if 
a door had been set ajar into another clime, the 
breath of winter has been upon us, the splendor of 
illimitable fields of snow has blinded us, and we 
have seen in a glance the dark line of spruce and 
fire as it climbs the white peak against the deep 
blue horizon line. But the snow-shoe has its serious 
and even humiliating aspects. The novice who ties 
it on his moccasin and goes forth for the first time 
in rash and exulting confidence is likely to meet 
with swift and calamitous eclipse. He mounts the 
first inviting drift of beautiful snow, only to dis- 
appear in a humiliation and perplexity from which 
he emerges blinded, breathless, and whiter than the 
Polar bear. The unsympathetic jeers of his com- 
panions complete the discipline and stimulate to 
further catastrophes, which in the end work out the 
peaceful results of wisdom and training. But the 
secret once learned, snow-shoeing is thenceforth a 
measureless delight. 

Thoreau declares that in one sense we cannot live 
too leisurely. "Let me not live as if time was 
short. Catch the pace of the seasons, have leisure 
to attend to every phenomenon of nature, and to 
entertain every thought that comes to you. Let your 
life be a leisurely progress through the volumes of 
nature ..." To thoroughly enter into the life of 
nature one must accept her mood at the moment, 
and she has as many moods as the mortals who seek 



A DAY OUT OF DOORS. i6l 

her companionship ; but with all her moods she is 
never moody. On a summer's day the spacious 
leisure of the forest invites one to complete cessa- 
tion of effort ; to that profound repose which sets 
every door ajar for fresh perceptions and new influ- 
ences. But on a clear, cold winter's morning a 
very different spirit is abroad ; not repose, but inten- 
sity of action, is solicited. There lies the great 
world, from which the traces of individual owner- 
ship have been almost obliterated ; who will claim 
it, and enforce his claim with absolute possession? 
It is in response to this inspiring challenge that 
the man on snow-shoes enters the field. If he is 
made of the right stuff he has the air of a great pro- 
prietor To him roads and fences and all artificial 
boundary lines are as if they were not ; he owns the 
landscape, and there are moments when he feels as if 
the sky had been hung above his wide, free world 
to give him the last and most delicate sensation of 
adventure. The great joy of the man on snow- 
shoes is the consciousness of freedom. He is 
released frcm the tyranny of the roads and the 
impertinent intrusion of fences; places that were 
once forbidden or inaccessible are now open to him; 
fields given over to the selfishness of agriculture are 
leased to nature for the nobler uses of beauty and 
his personal adventure ; there is no secluded pond 
in the woods to which he cannot choose his own 
path; there is no remote outlook across field or 
swamp to which he cannot swiftly make his way. 



1 62 MY STUDY FIRE. 

The great drifts, the long levels of snow in the open 
places, are so many exhilarating opportunities to 
him, and he accepts the invitation of nature to come 
abroad with her not as an inferior but as an equal. 

The snow-shoe is ingeniously devised to diffuse 
man's ponderosity over a larger surface; to enable 
him to go by artifice where the natural construction 
of his body would forbid his going. This well 
devised aid to escape from civilization sets free the 
mind at the same time that it removes a physical 
limitation. The man who cannot get away from 
himself on snow-shoes is a galley slave who deserves 
the oar and will never escape from it. But most 
men who find themselves afield so equipped cast off 
all bondage of mind to old habits and limitations by 
an effort so natural that it is purely unconscious. 
They are filled with an insatiable desire to take deep 
breaths, to penetrate every recess of the world about 
them, to overcome every obstacle and leave nothing 
untried. In the vigorous morning air all enterprises 
are open, and one waits neither to count the hours 
nor the difficulties. The earth shines like the sky, 
and a kind of ineffable splendor crowns the day. 
Level field and rolling meadow, stretch of lowland 
and sweep of mountain, unbroken surface of lake 
and curving whiteness of river losing itself behind 
the hills — all these lie within the vision and invite 
exploration. The dark green masses of pine and 
spruce rest the eye dazzled by the universal bril- 
liancy. The mountains have a marvelous delicacy 



A DAY OUT OF DOORS. 163 

and charm ; instead of presenting a flat surface of 
dead white they reveal a thousand soft and rounded 
outlines ; each tree is individualized and stands out 
in clear and perfect symmetry, and every branch 
and leaf is white with exquisite frost work. At 
sunset, when the last tender light of the winter day 
falls on those deep, rich masses of frost tracery, one 
will see a vanishing loveliness as tender as the flush 
of the rose leaf and as ethereal as the light of a 
solitary star when it first touches the edges of the 
hills. The day ends in Hesperian splendor. 

But, fortunately, the day is still in its prime, and, 
as one chooses the deepest drift and climbs to the 
top of the nearest hill, he wishes it might never 
end. Arrived at the summit, breathless and exul- 
tant, he looks for the hollow which has caught the 
drifts, and, after a moment's rest, he runs swiftly 
down to the pond below, sliding on the crusts, and 
moving more slowly and cautiously over light snow 
of whose depth and yielding quality he has perhaps 
already had sad experience. The level surface of 
the pond lacks that variety which is the charm of 
snow-shoeing, and so one skirts the shore and takes 
the first accessible opening into the woods; and 
now delight and danger are mixed in the most delici- 
ous compound. The remoteness, the silence, and 
the solitude of the winter woods are simply enchant- 
ing; the sky is softly blue between the "bare, 
ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang"; 
every twig is snow-bound, and the only evidence of 



164 MY STUDY FIRE. 

life is the track of the rabbit or the fox. One 
tramps on, jubilant and self-forgetful, until suddenly 
some unseen root catches in the interstices of the 
snow-shoe, and then alas for human greatness ! But 
the disaster is only momentary — is, indeed, part of 
the novel and fascinating experience. On and on 
through the deep recesses of the forest one makes his 
way, and at every turn some lovely or impressive 
wintry scene frames itself for permanent hanging in 
the memory. Now it is a little snow covered hol- 
low where one is sure the mosses grow thick in 
summer; now it is a solitary tree whose tracery of 
branches is exquisitely etched against the sky ; now 
it is a side hill swiftly descending to the narrow 
brook, the music of whose running still lingers softly 
cadenced in the ear of memory ; now it is a sudden 
glimpse of the mountains that rise in the wide 
silence and solitude like primeval altars whose lofty 
fires are lighted at sunrise and sunset ; and now, as 
one leaves the forest behind, the last picture is the 
river winding through the dark, wild mountain 
gorge, its waters rushing impatient and tumultuous 
over the ice that strives in vain to fetter them. 

The short day is already hurrying to its close ; 
but its brevity has no power over the memories one 
has plucked from wood and field. Reluctantly one 
hurries homeward. The smoke from the little vil- 
lage in the hollow rises in straight white lines above 
every house, and as one pauses for a moment, 
before descending, to take in the picture, one recalls 



< 



!-. 



i. 



A DAY OUT OF DOORS. 165 

a similar moment of which Thoreau has preserved 
the fleeting impression: "The windows on the 
skirts of the village reflect the setting sun with 
intense brilliancy, a dazzling glitter, it is so cold. 
Standing thus on one side of the hill, I begin to see 
a pink light reflected from the snow about fifteen 
minutes before the sun sets. This gradually deepens 
to purple and violet in some places, and the pink is 
very distinct, especially when, after looking at the 
simply white snow on other sides, you turn your 
eyes to the hill. Even after all direct sunlight is 
withdrawn from the hill-top, as well as from the 
valley in which you stand, you see, if you are pre- 
pared to discern it, a faint and delicate tinge of 
purple and violet there. " But the vanishing beauty 
of this hour eludes even the pencil of Thoreau, and as 
you take off your snow-shoes you are aware that you 
have become the possessor of a day which you will 
always long to share with others, but the memory of 
which, in spite of all your efforts toward expression, 
will remain incommunicable. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

BESIDE THE ISIS. 

There is a willful spirit in the study-fire which 
eludes all attempts to make it the servant of human 
moods and habits. It is gay and even boisterous 
on days when it ought to be melancholy, and it is 
despondent at times when it ought to be cheerful. 

There is much that is akin to human thought in 
it, and there is much that is alien ; for the wild, free 
life of the woods blazes and sings in its flames. Its 
glow rests now on one and now on another of the 
objects that lie within its magic circle; one day it 
seems to seek the poet's corner, and lingers with a 
kind of bright and merry tenderness about those rows 
of shining names; on other days it makes its home 
with the travelers, as if in fancy mingling its softer 
radiance with the fiery brightness of the desert, or 
breaking a little the gloom of the arctic night. Some- 
times it lies soft and warm on one of the two or 
three faces that hang on the study walls; on the 
old poet whose memory lends a deep and beautiful 
interest to one of the quaintest of Old World towns ; 
or on the keen, pure face of one so modern and 
American that, although the cadence of the pine 
166 



BESIDE THE ISIS. 167 

breaks the silence where he sleeps, he is still so far 
in advance of us that we cannot call ourselves his 
contemporaries. To-day it rests contentedly on a bit 
of landscape to which one's imagination goes out in 
these springs days as to one of those enchanting 
places which are its visible homes. It is a glimpse 
of the garden of New College at Oxford, with the 
beautiful Magdalen tower in the distance; the 
venerable trees, the stretch of velvety sward, the 
ivy-covered gate in the foreground. As the eye 
rests upon it memory fills in the imperfect picture; 
the bit of the old city wall hidden by the dense 
masses of ivy, the walk shadowed by ancient trees, 
the sculptured walls of the College — these rise on the 
inward vision under the spell of this glimpse of the 
venerable town on the Isis. And with them comes 
that which no visible portraiture can represent ; the 
Old World silence and peace, the ripe loveliness, 
the brooding presence of ancient memories ! One 
feels here the deepest spell of that history which, 
although localized on an alien continent, is still the 
background of his own life ; that history which lives 
in names as familiar as the names of those who stand 
nearest us, in thoughts that are our constant com- 
panions, in words whose music is never silent in our 
memory. Melancholy indeed must be the lot of 
one who could sit under these ancient trees in this 
ancient world, where nature and art conspired cen- 
turies ago to lay eye and imagination under a com- 
mon spell, and not feel himself in some sense one 



1 68 MY STUDY FIRE. 

of the heirs of this incomparable inheritance be- 
queathed by history, art, and scholarship to this 
busy, changing modern world. From the day, now 
more than five centuries past, when the princely 
generosity of that princely scholar and man, William 
of Wykeham, opened the noble quadrangle of New 
College to "seventy scholars studying in the facul- 
ties," to this spring day, when the limes are green 
and the soft April skies spread over spire and tower, 
this place has been sacred to the "things of the 
mind." 

To recall the names of the Oxford scholars, from 
Roger Bacon and Wyclif to Jowett and Pattison, is 
to revive the most splendid traditions of English 
learning, and to traverse step by step the great 
stages of the intellectual growth of the modern 
world: medievalism, with its kindred scholasticism ; 
the Renaissance, with its ardent teachers of the new 
learning; the Reformation, whose visible witness to 
liberty and conscience stands in St. Giles Street; 
the broad, rich movement of recent scholarship 
associated with a score of famous names. One may 
look through Mr. Hogg's eyes into Shelley's rooms 
in University College, where the slight, shy poet 
carries on his chemical experiments, or watch him 
when on Magdalen Bridge he abruptly snatches a 
baby from its mother's arms to interrogate it con- 
cerning pre-existence; or take note of Addison 
meditating under the elms by the Cherwell ; or of 
Johnson in his poor chamber in Pembroke Gate 



BESIDE THE ISIS. 169 

tower ; or study the faces of Wolsey and Gladstone 
as they hang in the hall of Christ Church ; or 
strive to recall, in the week-day solitude of St. 
Mary's, the spell of those sermons spoken sixty years 
ago from its pulpit by one of the masters of English 
speech, who has been also a master of the things of 
the spirit. One may find all shrines of ancient 
worship and consult all spirits of ancient wisdom in 
this beautiful city, "so venerable, so lovely, so un- 
ravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, 
so serene!" Well might the poet and scholar who 
loved her and honored her with his own delicate 
genius, his own manly independence, add: "And 
yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her 
gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her 
towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, 
who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm 
keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all 
of us, to the ideal, to perfection — to beauty, in a 
word, which is only truth seen from another side?" 
There are glimpses everywhere which lure one 
away from this lovely garden of New College; in 
every quadrangle there are associations with great 
names. But if one is in a meditative mood, he will 
be loth to exchange the silence of this venerable 
garden for the magnificence of the Christ Church 
quadrangles or for the noble vista of High Street, 
which Hawthorne long ago pronounced the most 
impressive street in England. The spell of Oxford 
is in the air, and one comes under it most entirely 



170 MY STUDY FIRE. 

when he loiters in one of these ancient fastnesses 
of the beautiful English verdure. As one waits on 
the genius of the place, one recalls the words of 
the pure and noble scholar whose life and thought 
have been an education to his country. No modern 
man has valued scholarship more intelligently and 
justly than Emerson. His life was given to its pur- 
suits, and his work, singularly free from the intru- 
sion of the processes and terminology of scholarship, 
is ripe with its wisdom and weighty in expression 
of its large results. "A scholar, " said Emerson, 
"is the favorite of heaven and earth, the excellency 
of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead 
him directly into the holy ground where other men's 
aspirations only point. His successes are occasions 
of the purest joy to all men." Never were truer 
words written; the world does not reward its 
scholars as it rewards those who achieve more 
practical or more striking and picturesque successes, 
but in its heart it honors them and recognizes, by 
instinct if not by intelligence, that they are the 
ministers of its noblest interests. Those only who 
have had a share, however small, in the pursuit of 
knowledge for its own sake know how engrossing 
the pursuit is, and how all other forms of activity 
lose interest in comparison with it. There is for 
all such minds an irresistible fascination in the 
scholar's work; a spell which makes the years one 
long preoccupation, and life an intense and insati- 
able hunger for more light and truth. The pedant 



BESIDE THE ISIS. 17* 

deals with the husks of things, but the scholar deals 
with the great realities which are disclosed and 
expressed in the vast range of human knowledge. 
He lives continually in the great moments and with 
the great minds; he escapes the limitations of the 
passing hour into the great past or into the larger 
movement of his own time. The noblest works of 
the noblest men are his habitual companions, and 
he looks upon life with eyes which distinguish its 
main currents from its conflicting and momentary 
eddies. 

Here, within these ivy-clad walls, with this vision 
of mediaeval towers and turrets and spires, embo- 
somed in a quiet in which great voices seem to be 
hushed, one believes with Emerson that the scholar 
is the most fortunate of men. One recalls the ripe 
and fruitful seekers after truth who have lived and 
died in these peaceful retreats ; pacing year after 
year these shaded walks, working in the libraries, 
meditating by the mullioned windows with all the 
magical beauty of Oxford spread out before them. 
Was it not Hawthorne who wished that he had one 
life to spend entirely in Oxford. In this enchant- 
ing "home of lost causes and impossible loyalties" 
one could easily imagine himself becalmed forever; 
always meaning to break the charm and return to 
the turbulent world not two hours away, and yet 
always postponing the final parting to a morrow 
which never comes. 

From the reverie into which the firelight on the 



I7 2 MY STUDY FIRE. 

bit of landscape has lured me insensibly, I awake to 
find the fire dying and the sky splendid with the 
midnight stars. The towers of Oxford have become 
once more a memory, but that which gives them 
their most enduring charm may be here as well as 
there ; for here no less than beside the Isis one may 
love scholarship and pursue it, one may hold to 
the things of the mind against all the temptations of 
materialism, one may live his own life of thought. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

A WORD FOR IDLENESS. 

The study fire is sometimes so potent a solicita- 
tion to reverie that I ask myself whether it be not a 
subtle kind of temptation. Even when a man has 
cleared himself of the cant of the day, as Carlyle 
would put it, and delivered himself of the American 
illusion that every hour not devoted to ' 'doing some- 
thing" is an hour wasted, the inherited instinct is 
still strong enough to make a faint appeal to con- 
science. Those active, aggressive words, "doing" 
and "getting," have so long usurped the greater 
part of the space in our vocabulary that we use the 
words being and growing with a little uncertainty; 
most of us are not entirely at ease with them yet. 
One of the highest uses of literature is the aid it 
gives us in securing something like harmony of life — 
a just balance between the faculties which are 
developed by practical affairs and those which need 
the ampler air of intellectual movement. Litera- 
ture is the mute but eloquent witness forever testify- 
ing to the reality and power of ideas and ideals. 
Every great poem is a revelation of that invisible 
world of beauty in which all may claim citizenship, 
i73 



174 MY STUDY FIRE. 

but in which those alone abide who are rich in their 
own natures; a world in which no activity is valued 
by the stir it makes, and no achievement measured 
by the noise which accompanies it. 

When I recall these things, I perceive that the 
study fire is helping me to be true to myself when 
it gently lures me on to reverie and meditation. 
There is a vast difference between being busy and 
being fruitful. Busy people are often painfully 
barren and uninteresting. Their activity expends 
itself in small mechanical ways that add nothing to 
the sum of human knowledge or happiness. On 
the other hand, people who are apparently idle, who 
seem to be detached from the working world, are 
often the most fruitful. Our standards of work and 
idleness are in sad need of revision — a revision which 
shall substitute character for mere activity, and 
measure worth and achievement by the depth and 
richness of nature disclosed. The prior of the 
Carmelite convent at Frankfort described Giordano 
Bruno as a man always "walking up and down, filled 
with fantastic meditations upon new things." In 
the judgment of the busy people of his time, Bruno, 
although by no means devoid of energy, was pro- 
bably accounted an idler. His occupations were 
different from theirs, and therefore, of course, to 
be condemned; "so runs the world away. " But 
time, which has corrected so many inadequate judg- 
ments, has overruled the decision of Bruno's crit- 
ics ; they have ceased with their works, but those 



A WORD FOR IDLENESS. 1 75 

"fantastic meditations" have somehow sustained 
their interest, and there now stands on the Campo 
de' Fiori at Rome a statue of the scholar whose 
walking up and down attracted the attention of the 
Carmelite prior three centuries ago and more. In 
these apparently inactive hours of meditation great 
thoughts rise out of the silent deep over which a 
man broods inactive and absorbed. 

Balzac was a prodigious worker. Measured by 
the standard he set, the real toil of most people 
who account themselves busy shrinks to very small 
dimensions. A kind of demoniac energy seized the 
great novelist when a new work lay clear in his 
mind, drove him off the boulevard, locked him in 
his working room, and held him there in almost 
solitary confinement until the novel was written, 
and the novelist emerged worn, exhausted, and 
reduced to a shadow of his former self. This an- 
guish of toil — for work so intense and continuous is 
nothing less than anguish — was prolonged through 
years, and the fruit of it fills several shelves in our 
book-cases; and yet the highest work which Balzac 
did was not done in those solitary and painful days 
when the fever of composition was on him ; it was 
done in the long, apparently idle hours which he 
spent on the boulevards, and at the cafes. In 
those hours his keen and powerful mind was receiv- 
ing impressions, collecting facts, observing men, 
drinking in the vast movement of life which went 
on about him and in which every social condition, 



176 MY STUDY FIRE. 

every phase of character, every process of moral 
advance or decay, was revealed. These meditative 
hours, in which the hands were idle that the mind 
might have freest range and the imagination unin- 
terrupted play, were the creative periods; in them 
great works were planned, developed, shaped. 
They were the real working hours of the novelist, 
who displayed on an immense canvas the France of 
his day. 

One can imagine as he studies the face of Shakes- 
peare or of Goethe, charged with the very spirit of 
meditation, what long and inspiring hours of thought, 
of deep brooding upon the mystery of the soul, lay 
behind the works of these masters of man and his 
life. Out of this profound silence, in which the 
soul opened itself, hushed and reverential, to the 
lessons of time and eternity, the great works grew 
as the tree and the flower spring out of the hidden 
places of the soil. Men of affluent nature, to 
whom thought brings its solemn revelations, and on 
the unseen horizon of whose souls the light of the 
imagination glows like sunrise on new and undis- 
covered worlds, live in this mood of meditation — 
the mother of all the glorious works of art and litera- 
ture which inspire and sustain us. These hours 
in which no activity breaks the current of thought 
are the creative periods; hours solemn with that 
kinship with Deity which comes when the eye dis- 
cerns the path of the divine thought, or sees with 
prophetic vision the image of that beauty with which 



A WORD FOR IDLENESS. 177 

all created things are suffused. The deepest life is 
as silent as the soil out of which the glory of sum- 
mer bursts ; all noble activities issue from it, and 
no great work is ever done save by those who have 
lived in the repose which precedes creation. 



12 



CHAPTER XXIX. 
"the bliss of solitude." 

When I looked out of the study window this 
morning, and saw the wide stretch of country to the 
distant hills covered with drifting snow, which a 
fierce and wilful wind carried hither and thither in 
whirling clouds like vagrant wraiths, I knew what 
Emerson meant when he wrote that fine line about 
the "tumultuous privacy of storm." Wind and 
snow bar all the gates to-day with invisible bolts ; 
the village is as remote and detached as if it were 
on another continent. Across all the avenues of 
communication is written "no thoroughfare"; the 
road through the woods will remain for hours with- 
out a disturbing wheel, and with no traveler save 
the shy wild dwellers of the place, glad of this sud- 
den barricade against human intrusion. On the 
hearth, as if answering the shouts of the riotous 
wind down the chimney, the fire burns with un- 
wonted cheeriness. 

Qn such a morning, when nature takes matters 

in her own hands and locks the doors of ingress and 

egress without so much as saying "by your lea^e, " 

one settles down to a day of meditation and reading 

178 



" THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE." 1 79 

with peculiar and un qualified satisfaction . No hand 
will let the knocker fall, with resounding clangor, 
at the very moment when you have completely 
lost yourself in some beautiful country of the soul — 
some distant island where Prospero still holds his 
unburied rod and reads in his unsunken books; 
some valley of Avalon, where the apple blossoms 
still rain the sweetness of perennial summer on the 
mailed hand of chivalry. Best of all, no disquiet- 
ing voice of duty will call persistently from some 
remote quarter; you have been bolted and barred 
against the intrusion even of your conscience. So 
lodged, one may give himself up to the solitude of 
the day without any other feeling than that of repose 
and delight. Happy is he whom life offers the gift 
of solitude; that gift which makes so many other 
gifts available ! Happy is he to whom with books 
and the love of meditation there is also given the 
repose, the quiet, the isolation which are the very 
breath of the life of thought! We are swift to 
praise heroism and self-denial when these take on 
striking forms and appeal to the eye or the imagina- 
tion ; but how infrequent is our recognition of that 
noble resignation which takes the form of quiet ac- 
ceptance of limitations which separate one from the 
work of his heart and divide him from the joy of his 
life! 

Happy are they, however, to whom solitude 
brings its deep and satisfying joy — the joy of fel- 
lowship with great souls, of companionship with 



l8o MY STUDY FIRE. 

nature in that sublime communion which Aubrey 
De Vere describes as "one long mystic colloquy be- 
tween the twin-born powers, whispering together of 
immortality" ; of quiet brooding over one's thought; 
of the rapture of the imagination detaching itself 
from the world of habit and work, and breathing 
the ampler ether of the great Idealisms. Nothing 
redeems a life from the barrenness of continued 
activity so completely as a stream of deep, silent 
meditation running under all one's work, and rising 
into light when the day of solitude comes round. 
It has been said of Shakespeare that his face bears 
the marks of habitual meditation ; there is visible 
in it the calmness and fullness of a mind forever 
brooding over the deep things of life ; steadied by 
contemplation of the unfathomable gulfs beneath, 
uplifted by vision of the shining heights above, 
calmed and held in poise by familiarity with the 
unmeasured forces which play about us. 

There is no shirking of common duties, no self- 
indulgence, in this separation from our fellows. 
The Irishman who defined solitude as "being alone 
with one's sweetheart" was not so far out of the 
way as he seems at the first blush. For the solitude 
that is a necessity to thoughtful natures is not isola- 
tion ; it is separation from the stress and turmoil of 
the world. Wordsworth's life at Grasmere was a 
life of solitude, but not a solitary life ; on the con- 
trary, it was enriched and ministered to by the 
most intimate and devoted companionship. That 



" THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE:' 181 

companionship did not introduce new and contra- 
dictory influences in the poet's life; it brought no 
pressure of other and diverse aims and ideals to 
bear on his work. It confirmed and inspired him 
by constant and pervading sympathy. His days 
were spent in solitude, without solitariness or isola- 
tion ; the atmosphere of his fireside was not differ- 
ent from that which reigned among the hills in those 
long hours when the poet paced to and fro along his 
garden paths, chanting his own lines in low mono- 
tone. 

There is nothing more delightful about the study 
fire than the sense of congenial solitude which it 
conveys — the solitude of quiet, reposeful hours, 
"far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." 
The world must be with us, but not too much with 
us, if we would gain that calm, complete mastery 
of ourselves which marks full intellectual stature. 
No large-minded man reviles the world; he knows 
its uses and value too well for that ; it is the cramped, 
narrow, or morbid natures who seek complete isola- 
tion, and in the little circle of their own individu- 
alism find that satisfaction which comes to men of 
larger mold only from free and inspiring contact 
with the whole order of things of which they are 
part. It is not rejection of society, but wise and 
right use of it, which characterizes the man who lives 
most richly in the things of the mind. One finds 
in solitude only that which he takes into it; it gives 
nothing save the conditions most favorable to growth. 



152 MY STUDY FIRE. 

The quiet hours before one's fire, with one's books 
at hand ; the long ramble along the woodland road — 
these make one free to brood over the thoughts that 
come unbidden, to follow them step by step to their 
unseen goals, and to drink in the subtle and invisi- 
ble influences of the hour when one gives one's self 
/ up to it. There is nothing in all the rich and deep 
experience of life so full of quiet joy, so freighted 
with the revelations of the things we seek with com- 
pletest sincerity, as these pauses of solitude in the 
ceaseless stir and movement of the world. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

A NEW HEARTH. 

In most men there is a native conservatism; 
even those who are progressive and radical in their 
view of things in general are stanch defenders of old 
habits and familiar places. The man who has his 
doubts about absolute private ownership will hesi- 
tate long before cutting down some old-time tree 
whose beauty decay is fast changing into ugliness, 
or giving up the inconvenient and narrow home of 
childhood for more ample and attractive quarters. 
We cling to old things by instinct, and because they 
have been a part of our lives. When Rosalind and 
myself began talking about a new and ampler hearth 
for the study fire, the prospect, although alluring 
was not without its shadows. There was not only 
the consciousness of the surrender of delightful 
associations, but the thought of the newness to be 
made old and the coldness to be made warm. A 
fresh hearth has no sentiment until the fire has 
roared up the wide- throated chimney on windy 
nights, no associations until its glow has fallen 
on a circle of familiar faces. 

But how soon the strange becomes familiar, and 
183 



1 84 MY STUDY FIRE. 

that which was detached from all human fellowship 
takes on the deeper interest and profounder mean- 
ing of human life ! Rosalind had barely lighted the 
fire on the new hearth before the room seemed fa- 
miliar and homelike. The bit of driftwood which 
the children laid on at a later stage was really needed 
to give a suggestion of something strange and for- 
eign to our daily habit. There is a wonderful 
power in us of imparting ourselves to our surround- 
ings ; the fountain of vitality constantly overflows 
and fertilizes everything we touch. We give our- 
selves to the rooms in which we live and the tools 
with which we work. It is not only the pen with 
which the great man wrote and the toy with which 
the little child played that gain a kind of sacred- 
ness in our eyes; it is almost every object that has 
had human use. The infinite pains which Balzac 
put into the description of the belongings of his 
chief characters give evidence of that virile genius 
which caught not only the direct ray of character 
but gathered up also its myriad reflections in the 
things it used. Life is always the most precious of 
our possessions, and it is because inanimate things 
often hold so much of it that they come to have a 
kind of sanctity for us. 

If the deeper history of our race were written, 
would not one half of it record the attachments 
which men have formed for visible and invisible 
things — for homes and churches and countries, for 
institutions and beliefs and ideals — and the other 



A NEW HEARTH. 1 85 

half record the struggles and the agony with which 
men have detached themselves from the things they 
have loved? To humanize by use and by love, and 
then to forsake as the trees drop their leaves in au- 
tumn — is not this the human story and the human 
destiny? There is a noble side to it, and a very 
painful side. I can readily understand the half- 
pathetic note of those who recall the past with a 
poignant sense of loss; to whom the great inspira- 
tions have remained in the beliefs and the ideals 
of youth, and whose later journey has been one 
ever-widening separation from the dear familiar 
things of long ago. The men in the early part of 
the century, who had read Addison and Dryden and 
Pope in childhood, could not be expected to discern 
at once the genius of Wordsworth, or to hear at first 
the ethereal strain of Shelley ; as to-day many who 
were nourished on Wordsworth and Byron and 
Keats are unresponsive to Browning or Rossetti; 
and now that the massive harmonies of the German 
composers are filling the opera-houses, there are 
many who openly or in secret are longing for those 
brilliant Italian melodies which once captivated the 
world. The past must be dear to us, since it was 
once part of us, and when we recall its story we 
turn the pages of our own biography. The old 
hearthstone can never be other than sacred, since 
the light of it was on faces that we loved, and the 
song of it was often our own thought set to the 



1 86 MY STUDY FIRE. 

cheerful music which the logs sing when the living 
woods are silent. 

But shall there be no new hearth because the old 
hearth has so often warmed and comforted us ; no 
new song because the old songs set our youth to 
their thrilling music ? The charm of the past always 
remains ; we do not surrender it when we accept 
the new truth and listen to the new melody; we are 
not disloyal to it when we live deeply and resolutely 
in the age which gives us birth. For myself, a radi- 
cal of radicals in the faith that the better things are 
always in the future, that truth has always fresh 
voices to speak for it, and art new inspirations to 
lend it new beauty, I believe that the only way to 
understand the past is to accept and live in the pres- 
ent. The true Wordsworthian is he who discrmi- 
nates the great and genuine work of the poet from 
that which bears his name but not his genius — not 
he who insists that all the lines have equal inspira- 
tion. The true lover of Browning is not he who 
affirms the infallibility of the poet, but he who takes 
account of the ebb and flow of the poet's inspira- 
tion. The true lover of the things that have been 
done and the men who did them is not he who lives 
in the past and lacks, therefore, a just perspective; 
but he who lives in his own time, loyal to its duties 
and open to its visions, and who sees the past as 
one looks upon a landscape from an elevation which 
brings all its landmarks and boundaries into clear 
view. Let the fire blaze on the new hearth and 



A NEW HEARTH. 187 

sing lustily in the throat of the new chimney ; its 
light still falls on the old books and gilds the familiar 
titles! We cannot reject the past if we would; it 
is part of us, and it travels with us wherever we go. 
Not by reproducing its forms, but by discerning its 
spirit, do we really honor it. It is an illusion that 
the past was fixed and permanent, and that we are 
in the seething flood. The past was never less 
mobile than the present; it was always changing, 
and that which seems fixed and stable to us is the 
form — the only part that is dead. Read deeply any 
of the old books, and you will hear the roar of the 
rushing river in them as distinctly as you hear it in 
Hugo or Ibsen or Tennyson. Beneath the great 
tragedies to which the Greeks listened what a vast 
movement of the deeps of human thought and feel- 
ing! Beneath the "Divine Comedy" what a whirl 
of rushing tides! Beneath Marlowe and Shakes- 
peare what tumult of the great seas ! Genius means 
always and everywhere change and movement; never 
yet has it lacked the vision which made the future 
dear to it. When that vision ceases to inspire the 
artist's thought and hand, genius will take its flight. 
For the deepest and most inspiring truth in which 
we live is the truth that life is change and growth, 
not fixity of form and finality of development. 
Things move, not because they are unstable, but 
because a divine impulse impels them forward ; the 
stars travel, not because they are wanderers in the 
skies, but because they are the servants of a sub- 



loo MY STUDY FIRE. 

lime order. There are no fixed and permanent 
social conditions, because society is slowly moving 
toward a nobler ordering of its duties and its rights ; 
there are no final books, because the human spirit, 
of which the greatest books are but imperfect ex- 
pressions, is always passing through manifold experi- 
ences into larger knowledge of itself and of the 
world about it ; there are no final forms of art be- 
cause truth has always new beauty to reveal and 
beauty new truth to illustrate. Let the fire on the 
new hearth sing its lusty song of the summers that 
are past; its music has no note of forgetfulness ; 
memory and prophecy are the burden of its song. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 

In these spring days all manner of alluring invi- 
tations find their way into my study and by the sug- 
gestions which they bring with them make its walls 
narrow and dingy in spite of the glow which pleasant 
associations have cast upon them. When I sit at 
my writing table in the morning and carefully ar- 
range the unwritten sheets which are to receive the 
work of the day, a playful breeze comes in at the 
window and willfully scatters the spotless pages 
about the room as if to protest against work and 
seclusion in these radiant days when the heavens 
rain sweet influences and the earth gives back its 
bloom and fragrance. I think then of all manner 
of places where the earliest and tenderest beauty of 
summer abides ; the imagination revolts against 
work and, like a child let loose from city squares, 
runs through meadows white with daisies and into 
bosky hollows where the ferns breathe out a deli- 
cious coolness. I cannot resist the impulse which 
nature yearly renews in this golden hour of her 
beauty, and so I sally forth to such refreshment 
and adventure as one may look for in the hey-day 
of spring time. 

189 



19° MY STUDY FIRE. 

Yesterday I waved my handkerchief with the 
throng who crowded the pier and sent their huzzas 
after the great steamer swinging slowly into the 
stream, bound for that old world of history and 
imagination which has such hold upon the most 
American of us all. I followed the little group 
whom my affection separated from the throng on 
the deck until I could distinguish their faces no 
more ; and then, when sight failed, thought traveled 
fast upon their foaming wake and travels with them 
still. I know what days of calm and nights of 
splendor, when the stars hang luminous over the silent 
world of waters, will be theirs ; I know with what 
eager gaze they will scan the low horizon line when 
the first indistinct outlines of another continent 
break its perfect symmetry; I hear with them the 
first confused murmur of that rich old-world life; I 
follow them through historic street to historic church 
and palace ; I see the blossoming hedges and mark 
the low ripple of quiet rivers flowing seaward, the 
murmur of whose movement lends its music to so 
much English poetry ; I catch a sudden glimpse of 
cloud-like peaks breaking the inaccessible solitude 
of the sky, and in a moment the whole landscape of 
that rich world sweeps into sight and invites me to 
join them in their wanderings. 

This season stirs one knows not what ancient in- 
stinct still in the very blood of our race, answering 
the first voices of the birds returning from their 
long journey, and the first outburst of life flowing 



AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 191 

back in the flood tide of advancing summer. The 
history of civilization is an Odyssey of wandering. 
From the hour when Abraham gathered his flocks 
and crossed the Euphrates, and those first Aryan 
ancestors of ours set out on their sublime emigra- 
tion westward, to this day, when the ax of the pio- 
neer rings through the California pine forests, and 
the camp-fire of the explorer rises beside the Congo, 
men have never ceased to travel hither and thither 
driven by a divine impulse to redeem and replenish 
the earth. In the long course of centuries the tent 
of the Arab is as permanent as the rock-built temple, 
and looking over history all races become nomadic. 
No race accepts its environment as permanent and 
final ; there is always somewhere beyond the hori- 
zon of its present condition ; an undiscovered Atlan- 
tis, an untrodden Isle of the Blessed, where life will 
beat with stronger pulse, and smite into the obsta- 
cles that surround it the impress of a higher destiny. 
As the thought of a great, new world sent Colum- 
bus wandering from court to court, so the intuition 
of some larger and grander life impels men continu- 
ally from continent to continent; not restlessness, 
but aspiration, fills the sails and turns the prow sea- 
ward forever and forever. The impulse which 
would not suffer Ulysses, old and travel-worn, to 
sit at ease stirs in the blood of the most modern of 
us all; our hearts beat to the music of his last ap- 
peal, spoken through one of the greatest of our 
modern poets: 



I9 2 MY STUDY FIRE. 

" "Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
Push off, and, sitting well in order, smite 
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds 
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
Of all the western stars, until I die." 

Those to whom the impulse to wander comes in 
vain are not without their consolations; the most 
adventurous explorers have dared and won for 
them, the most accomplished and keen-eyed travel- 
ers have not forgotten them. When these fancies 
invade my study and invite to journeys I cannot 
take, I turn to the well-filled shelves where my 
books of travel stand shoulder to shoulder and hold 
out a world which I need only cross the room to 
possess. Sometimes a rose penetrates my seclusion, 
and brings me visions of that far East from which 
it drew the first breath of its fragrant life. Then I 
find myself unconsciously putting out a hand for 
the well-worn books between whose covers Oriental 
color and romance are hidden. I have long left 
behind the mood in which I read Lamartine with 
eager zest, but there are days when I still find the 
old glamour resting on the pages of the "Souvenirs 
d' Orient," and my imagination kindles again under 
the spell of that fervid style. The East stands in 
our thought of to-day for the old age of the race ; 
but it was in the East that life began; and that 
buried childhood comes back to us with all the 
splendor of the earlier imagination. I hear once 
more the "sighing sakia" in Curtis's "Nile Notes," 



AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 193 

or draw rein on the great field of Esdraelon, flash- 
ing with the white blossoms of the Syrian spring- 
time; I cross the desert with "Eothen," and meet 
the dreaded plague at the gates of Cairo. 

But the prince of travelers is the superb Gautier, 
whose rich physical temperament stood related to 
the Eastern civilization so vitally that it almost 
made him, what he sometimes claimed to be, a veri- 
table Oriental. The color and glow of Eastern life 
were in his mind before he sought them in Algiers 
and at Constantinople; sensuous, full of delicate 
physical perceptions of the rich and varied forms of 
Oriental living, Gautier used all the resources of his 
marvelous style to reproduce the fading splendor 
which still remains among the older races. But 
Gautier, with his leonine face and Eastern tempera- 
ment, had the sensitive imagination of a true traveler: 
he reflected his environment with a fidelity which 
brought out not only its reality but its ideal also. In 
the "Voyage en Russie" and the "Voyage en Es- 
pagne," no less than in his pictures of Algerian and 
Turkish life, we breathe the very atmosphere which 
surrounds him, and are conscious of a thousand deli- 
cate gradations of color and manner which would 
have escaped an eye less keen, an imagination less 
plastic. 

D'Amicis is less brilliant, less fertile, less subtly 
and marvelously endowed with mastery of the re- 
sources of speech; but he has sharp insight, 
broad sympathies, a fine faculty of reproducing 
13 



194 MY STUDY FIRE. 

local coloring. His "Holland" is a classic of 
travel. 

From those marvelous "Voyages" of Richard 
Hakluyt to the charming books into which Charles 
Dudley Warner has put his impressions of foreign 
lands and peoples, the literature of travel has been 
one of increasing richness and fascination ; but as I 
look over these goodly volumes, I recognize their 
kinship with the graver works of history that stand 
in solemn rows not far distant. The lighter volumes 
are records of personal wanderings; the graver 
ones are records of those mysterious wanderings of 
races in which history began, and which it will 
always continue to report. In this latest century 
we have seen a transference of races far more roman- 
tic and impressive than that wonderful "Flight of 
a Tartar Tribe," whose story De Quincey tells with 
such dramatic skill. The ancient instincts still sur- 
vive beneath the culture of civilization, and ever and 
anon we are moved into strange, vagrant moods by 
their reappearance in consciousness. It is the shal- 
lower part of life, after all, that finds expression. 
Arts, literatures, civilization, are the few drops 
flung into the air from the running stream, and 
made iridescent by the passing flash of the sunlight; 
the vast current of thought, emotion, experience, 
flows on in darkness and silence. Like the tropical 
tree, civilization must support each expansion by 
sending down a new trunk to that ancient earth which 
cradled our infancy and from whom we can never 



AN IDYL OF WANDERING. 195 

be long separated. In the midst of our highest 
refinements, and under the influence of our ripest 
culture, there comes to each of us that mood which 
Mr. Lang has so admirably expressed in his noble 
sonnet on "The Odyssey ": 

" As one that for a weary space has lain 

Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine 
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine, 

Where that ^Esean isle forgets the main, 

And only the low lutes of love complain, 
And only shadows of wan lovers pine, 
As such an one were glad to know the brine 

Salt on his lips, and the large air again — 

So gladly, from the songs of modern speech 
Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free 
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers, 
And through the music of the languid hours 

They hear like ocean on a western beach 
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey." 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

THE OPEN "WINDOW. 

I have noticed that at the close of a long winter 
the opening of the windows makes 7 my books look 
faded and dusty. Yesterday, with the bright fire- 
light playing upon them, they were fresh and even 
brilliant; to-day, with the soft blue sky shining 
through the window, they are old and shabby. This 
singular transformation has taken place more than 
once in my experience, and as in each instance the 
spell has been wrought on the same books, I am 
forced to believe that the change is in me and not 
in my familiar volumes. In winter I find them 
opulent in life and warmth ; I feel in them the 
throb of the world's heart-beat; but when spring 
comes and the warm airs are full of invitation to 
the senses and the imagination, they become sud- 
denly meager, artificial, and commonplace. They 
shrink from the strong sunlight, and in the affluent 
splendor of the summer they are the pale ghosts of 
their former selves. 

The world of books is at best a world of shadows ; 

one turns from it at times to drink anew and with 

unspeakable delight at the inexhaustible fountains 

of life. Commentaries are admirable in their place, 

196 



THE OPEN WINDOW. 197 

but no true scholar ever permits them to stand long 
between his thought and the text; they help him in 
obscure passages, they light up dark and difficult 
sentences, but they are only aids ; the text itself is 
always his supreme and final object. The man who 
goes to books instead of life, who gets his knowl- 
edge of humanity out of Shakespeare and of nature 
out of Wordsworth, will never know either pro- 
foundly. The Alps are more majestic than the 
noblest picture of them which artist ever put upon 
canvas, and men and women in the multiform rela- 
tions of life more wonderful than any portraiture by 
the greatest dramatist. It is this mistake of taking 
the commentary for the text which makes most liter- 
ary men the slaves of art instead of the masters of 
life and its lessons; which fills their work with 
musical echoes and robs it of that mighty and com- 
manding utterance which truth learned at first hand 
always finds for itself. 

The library is at once a storehouse of treasures 
and a prison ; its value depends entirely upon its use. 
If one's thought is hourly and patiently travers- 
ing the highways of human life, if one's heart pene- 
trates with deep and abiding sympathy the small 
and the great experiences of men and women, one 
may use books and find nothing but light and power 
in them ; they will discover relations which have 
escaped observation; they will bring within the 
horizon of thought vast and fertile tracts through 
which one has never been able to journey; they will 



l 9 3 MY STUDY FIRE. 

suggest answers and solutions which will aid immeas- 
urably in the comprehension of the great mysteri- 
ous fact of life. But if one goes to books for funda- 
mental conceptions, for that experience which one 
never really gets unless he acquires it at first hand, 
for those large, controlling views of things which 
ought to be the creation of one's individual struggle 
with problems and difficulties and mysteries, they 
will prove inadequate and misleading teachers. No 
art can conceal or preserve that which has been bor- 
rowed from another; such second-hand creation 
often charms by its skill for a time, but its lack of 
vitality sooner or later makes it appear the barren, 
useless thing it is. No skill will save the picture 
which lacks the touch of nature, no art will give 
immortality to the book in which the pulse of life 
has never throbbed. 

To-day the generous warmth of the sun has 
tempted me out of my study and beguiled me into 
hours of aimless wandering. I have seen the great 
expanse of water between the arching elms, and 
have noted, with a kind of exultation, that the trees 
are no longer leafless ; the exquisite tracery of bare 
twig and branch is not so sharp of outline as when 
I saw it a week ago ; a delicate color suffuses itself 
over all, and blurs the edges that were sharp against 
the sky. A robin flashes across the stone wall, and 
yonder a medley of notes, dissonant with anger, 
betrays the recurrence of those annual quarrels which 
settle the question of possession in more than one 



THE OPEN WINDOW. 199 

tree-top. A soft mist has touched the woods at the 
water's edge, and woven a prophetic charm over 
them ; I find myself already weeks in advance of 
the season, for I seem to see even now the banners 
of summer afloat there, and to hear the inarticulate 
murmur of the forest weighty with the secrets of for- 
gotten centuries. It is a new heaven which bends 
so benignantly over me, and a new earth which stirs 
with unconscious life about me. A tide of creative 
energy surges through all things, and reinspires my 
faith in the coming of a clearer and yet clearer 
revelation of the divine mystery. In each recurring 
spring some sensitive soul has stood where I stand, 
and felt this subtle harmony with the new world 
bursting into leaf and flower about him, and, nearer 
akin to nature than I, has overheard some whisper 
of tree to tree, or bird to bird, or star to star. 
Straightway a new line has found its way into the 
world's anthology, a new song has found words for 
itself in the vocabulary of human speech, and finally, 
a new book gets into my study. But, at the best, it 
is only a faded reflection of that luminous sky which 
glows from this latest page, only a faint and confused 
murmur of that forest which I hear under the spell 
of this latest interpreter. The miracle remains 
incommunicable; no book will ever explain it to 
me; it must be wrought in and upon me. 

THE END. 



